What is the stupidest thing you have done at work?

#discuss #watercooler

This one time, I pushed some code to my branch and later on I saw that I had pushed the .env branch with a lot of secrets on the repo. I panicked. Even more so by seeing that the .env file was in all of my commits for that branch. I started looking for git commands that can be used to completely erase the existence of a file from the whole commit history and found a very obsure and VERY long command which for the life of me I can't find again.

Anyways, after a copy paste later, I had created a duplicate commit for each of my commit in the tree. Each pair consisted of one commit that had the .env file and one that didn't. My 50 commits became 100 commits and my project lead was of course furious and curious as to why I had pushed 50 more commits at once. I explained the whole situation to him.

Turns out they themselves had pushed the .env file on the master branch and all of the credentials inside it were of the development cluster. When I asked why it is so, they said that the repository is private anyway 🤷.

Feel free to share your stupid work story :)

Top comments (7)

Kasey Speakman • May 18 '20

One time I was working as IT support. My boss and I were complaining to each other about some latest round of management directives. We were getting riled up and decided to just walk out around lunch time. We went to a mall, ate, and played arcade games. After a couple of hours we cooled down. We started to wonder if anyone realized we left. And we came back as though nothing happened.

It makes for a funny story, but it was maybe a bit reckless.

Angad Sharma • May 18 '20

Yeah it was. But no one noticed so no harm done I guess 😂

lbonanomi • May 18 '20

This is a story that I tell new engineers after they screw something up, to give them a sense of scale:

Once upon a time I worked for the NYSE as a computer operator; my job was to essentially run through a set of defined commands on a regular cycle (10-15 minutes) and check-off boxes on a paper list. One of these checks involved me arrowing-through a curses menu on very heavily loaded Unix host and hitting enter to run internal diagnostics regularly.

[  ] Start the one and only application this system ran
[  ] Order a pizza?
[  ] Run quick diagnostics
[  ] Shutdown the application
[  ] Cleanup old files

Are you old enough to remember how unresponsive a curses menu can be when the system is loaded? Do you remember how your keypresses seemed to buffer, then all happen in a burst? Can you see how I overran where I wanted the cursor to be by one position and ended up halting the NYSE Tradefloor supervision system on a Tuesday right before lunch?

Having the board of directors of the NYSE call me up and ask what the ^*#!#@$ was happening was not a great moment for me, but I kept the job.