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I caused the loss of multiple millions of dollars in stock of one of the largest manufacturering companies in the world. All because I listened to my boss instead of my instincts. I got fired because the senior foreman "couldn't stand to look at my face"
Go on... tell us more please.
We are gonna need more details on this one
Lol, essentially the company closed down a bunch of plants to make one big plant. Dude in question was a foreman at each plant at one point in time. They start the new plant, fast forward like six months and I get hired to do IT. The guys laptop has a memory leak issue that we couldn't track down, so we were gonna reimage the machine. Had to backup data first. The company i worked for forced us to use a singular proprietary tool to do both. I was not allowed to manually back up anything ( like I wanted to, because seriously wtf) Well lo and behold this software doesn't give a shit about the D partition of the users HDD or anything on it, so it wipes that part. Well that was the part of the drive that had all calibration data, measurements, contacts in the industry. Pretty much the guys black book got wiped. This is literally during first quarter of a merger. I get fired. A few weeks or like a month later I see the company stock took a huge hit because of issues with a merger. I also run into an old coworker at a gas station like 6 months later and she informed me that everything went to shit when I left and they cut the staff by more than half. Over a hundred people lost their job because of my fuck up.
I would hardly call it your fuck up. You wanted to back up the data manually and were told not to - that's on your supervisor/boss/whoever called the shots. Not on you.
Your not wrong, and definitely not the first person to tell me that. But it still fucked with me for a while. There were a lot of really good people there, just trying to make there way. My actions, whether my fault or not, indirectly caused probably like 150+ people to lose their job, and that's on the day shift, idk if they even kept the night shift. I know it's not my fault, but like, I still feel a lil shitty about it, ya know. This was probably 6-7 years ago. Sense then I've learned my lesson and never ever keep my mouth shut and make sure I have all concerns documented. Ho boy has it saved my ass.
Did this guy just like... have critical company data not backed up, only on his laptop?
Yup, apparently that's exactly right lol. I was kinda green on that job so I didn't realize how wild that was. Thinking back on it, what the fuck?
Thats a massive no-no on the foremans part. If the D drive died, laptop lost/stolen, or some other issue occured, then they would have been in the exact same situation.
No backups on an external drive/server/printed files???
I work in R&D and my ass would be canned if I housed critical data like this, it goes against so many standard policies. The foreman and company screwed up both and made you a fall guy.
Yeah that's a good point. Now that I'm farther in my career i think it is pretty wild they didn't have some kinda back up software or network storage for critical stuff. The only reason I can think of is espionage, we were seriously worried about international espionage. I had to do training for it, we had a picture of Smokey the bear in our break room that said " only you can prevent government espionage". Shit, I just remembered the guy (super rough scruffy looking guy) cried over this, literally cried. Maybe he realized it was probably his ass for that too?