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The biggest mistake I made was taking the job, And the best thing I did was told them to take their job and stick it where the sun don't shine and walked out.
I told the president of the company “No” when he asked me a direct question about a project I was working on. The project had fallen behind and he asked if I had a makeup schedule to get the project back on track. I thought for a second and told him the truth. Within a few months I had been reassigned.
An interesting side note about this is that in this meeting not one of my peers or superiors came to my defense, but all of them sat there and let me incurr the full wrath of the president. Such is life in management!
Early on, I made the mistake of thinking some co-workers were actual friends as we and our families socialized together quite a bit. The reality is you can be friendly, but not friends, because most folks will stab you in the back and/or throw you under the bus if given the chance to make themselves look better.
Sometimes I forget I just work here... that if the higher ups have money to waste I should simply keep quiet..
25 years we were a small community medical facility that is now part of a large 100,000 employee organization...
Contract Admin was a big part of my previous job... now, it is all done at the corp level... but 25 years of penny pinching is hard to turn off.
Speaking of turning off... one simple change adds a 100k to the bottom line expense... such as running HVAC 24/7 where for 25 years it was controlled by an energy management program with optimal start/stop depending on environmental conditions...
Too many to count, but they've all been small mistakes, like mistakes on forms and calculation mistakes that have been caught before the project goes out the door.
With the amount of work that has to be done in timeframes at most corporate workplaces to try and maximize revenues it is IMPOSSIBLE not to make mistakes.
This. We've all heard the saying "If you don't have time to do it right, when will you find time to do it over?" haven't we? What I've discovered over the years is there is always time to do it over. Management wants things RIGHT NOW, regardless of quality. But once there panic for RIGHT NOW is satisfied, it goes on their desk to be ignored for a while and maybe never looked at again. If they do look at it, they may ask a specific question that you can then find the answer for when they ask.
I and most of my coworkers (all scientists and engineers) had a very hard time adjusting to that mindset. We like to do things right. Which also means a lot of answers are approximations, based on the amount of time to answer the question. Management on the other hand sees answers as perfect and concrete. Our answer to some question may be "10 plus/minus 2," given the amount of analysis that went in. Management hears 10 and then has a hissy fit when the real answer comes in 10.09. I've learned that since they are going to have the same reaction no matter what I say, I just give them a quick answer and then adjust later if they ask. It's easier to listen to one hissy fit rather than two or three about why it's taking so long to get an answer and they still won't like it anyway.
I was temping for a government contractor back in the 1990s who was sending out a Request for Proposal ("RFP") to about a dozen companies for a $50-60M project. I was given the list of companies and told to fax the RFP to each one. I promptly made a fax cover sheet and sent out the fax. Unfortunately, I was not told that I needed to fax each company individually so as to keep them from knowing who we were contacting - I put all the companies on one cover sheet and did a fax blast.
When I handed the fax confirmation sheet to my boss, she was horrified to see all of the companies listed on the single cover sheet. She went into panic mode at the thought that all of the companies now knew who we were requesting proposals from - and that it would likely affect the proposals they received as well as their subsequent power to negotiate.
I learned a big lesson that day about RFP work. Fortunately, my boss at the temp job did NOT fire me, but used it as a teachable moment.
I built batch cycles that did stock trade automation for clients. One client requested a change that I put through that caused them to miss the opening bell. I should have caught it, but they also should have not requested it.
I left that company, but earlier this year, a junior staff member was making an edit to a metadata setting in software that was notoriously buggy/fiddly. He should never have touched that setting, but that cascaded into impacting 100+ firms and lasting for three days. It ended up costing the company around $6 million in SLA breaches. The guy who made the error was fired, the VP fired the two managers above that person, and the owner fired the VP.
I built batch cycles that did stock trade automation for clients. One client requested a change that I put through that caused them to miss the opening bell. I should have caught it, but they also should have not requested it.
I left that company, but earlier this year, a junior staff member was making an edit to a metadata setting in software that was notoriously buggy/fiddly. He should never have touched that setting, but that cascaded into impacting 100+ firms and lasting for three days. It ended up costing the company around $6 million in SLA breaches. The guy who made the error was fired, the VP fired the two managers above that person, and the owner fired the VP.
I know a guy who told the CEO "You can't build a castle on a pile of sh*t", a not so subtle implication that management was the aforementioned pile.
The remark didn't go over so good. He wasn't around for long after that.
But did the guy think it was a mistake? Maybe he still stands behind what he said...at his new place of employment.
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