Hello, did you ever taught about mistakes you did, in your career? I was asked once about mistakes I made at work. And it was funny because at that moment I was asked about this. I simply could not remember any of the mistakes I had ever made. But I was sure I did. I simply could remember even once. And I realized that we often focus on how good we are and forget about our mistakes that taught us so much. Sometimes, funny, sometimes bad, and sometimes maybe even dangerous. But in fact, mistakes teach us a lot. So I try to remember some mistakes I made professionally. And I choose three of them to share with you here, that is it, no big deal, just three mistake stories…
The first one mistake story was when I manage the corporate server with corporate database with all company data inside this base. I was young, swamped, and not smart enough to realize that array of discs with strip and mirroring called RAID10 is not enough… as a backup of data… when I went back to my work after some break RAID controller simply broke. It was serious. The CEO of our company was scary, my co-owners were scary, and I felt I was so stupid. Thankfully it was physical hardware RAID controller without encryption, and one of my colleagues helped me because it was possible to read a physical portion of data from a pair of disks and connect it. The power of simple bash script and dd command in GNU/Linux come to his mind. And he helped me, that was teach me to always have backup, no matter what ;).
Second mistake story is about job agreement and money. I was lucky to once join one nice company and work with excellent software engineers. The company specialized in building business bank systems, and I was in the middle of the company with a research and quality department unit. So it was nice, and truth be told, it was a very nice workplace… except for… money I get. When I talked about joining this team, some money was proposed to me, and I was happy because that was good enough to take care of my family then. Unfortunately, on the first day of my work, I got a job agreement with my salary cut almost by half. And I had no option but to wend out of this situation, and my real mistake was not signing the job agreement before I resigned from my previous workplace. That unfortunate mistake teaches me a lot about this company and the sad truth about Polish managers that cheat you if it is possible. Later I found that not only Polish managers used to do that… That taught me never to forget about the papers you sign and the importance of paper signing time before you start something.
Last one third mistake story was a long time ago. I was in college about my third or fourth year of study. And I went for the first time to find some work for money. And because everyone at that time knew about my passion for GNU/Linus operation systems, one colleague asked me. Can I help his boss and the company he worked at with shaping the bandwidth of the Internet? It was in one popular of that time Internet Cafe. The problem to solve was the asymmetric connection to the Internet called ADSL that happens all the time when you have downloaded with a higher speed than you upload data bandwidth from and to the Internet. So you want to get data faster because you are doing it often. But the upload is not only for sending data like email or something is also about acknowledging the ACK of every packet, and it needs to be large enough for TCP ACK packets, right? That problem shaped the bandwidth for users to use the Internet gently. And I went for the first and last time for a conversation about work, and I was so incompetent. I was not prepared to talk. I do not even prepare something to get experience before that. That was embarrassing to my experience. I went to a job interview, not prepared and not ready. It was a shame kind of mistake. And that taught me never ever be improper or incompetent. And not feel this shame feeling never again or avoid it as often as possible.
So, that was my three chosen mistakes I did. Have you ever done something similar? Maybe you want to share here about that :). Please remember that people grow and learn from mostly or sometimes only mistake experiences. Do you agree? Is that make sense for you?
P ;).