What strikes me as remarkable in all such stories is how almost always, the person committing the mistake is a junior who never deserves the blame. And how cavalier the handoff/onboarding by the 'seniors' working on the projects are.
Having worked in enough of these though, I am aware that even they (the "seniors") are seldom entirely responsible for all the issues. It's mostly business constraints that forces cutting of corners and that ends up jeopardizing the business in the long run.
As I said on Slack the other day in response to a similar story, "If, on your first day, you can destroy the prod database, it's not your fault."
(One of my standard end-of-interview questions is "how easy is it for me to trash the production database?" Having done this previously[1] and had a few near misses, it's not something I want to do again.)
[1] In my defence, I was young and didn't know that /tmp on Solaris was special. Not until someone rebooted the box, anyway.
it gets wiped on reboot. I remember around 2007 on Gentoo Linux, this behavior changed. I was using /tmp as pretty much a "my documents" type folder, I updated, and one day all my stuff was gone! I was flabbergasted. But yeah, it was reckless to store things on a folder that pretty has "temp" in the name!
The blog post lays it on a bit thick with the $500 million number and the "launch only two weeks away" given that the article itself is illustrated with a photo of the Sojourner flight spare. Spirit had the SSTB1 test rover. If he had actually blown out the entire electrical system, they could have launched it instead. Swapping out the entire vehicle right before launch would have been an awful job, but it's not flat out impossible.
Not rude at all! I appreciate the reply. Only reason I deleted my message was because right after posting, I scrolled down and saw someone asking the exact same question at the top level, so I felt like it was best to conserve effort and not repeat them.
I liked that other people pointed out that risk could have been eliminated by using polarized connectors (I hope they started doing this after the incident), but also made me wonder about "back-EMF" caused by solar flares. In other words, maybe all thick wires and ground/power planes should be hardened against current surges simply due to a solar event hitting mars (which may incidentally cover the case of back-powering the driver circuits).
Having worked in enough of these though, I am aware that even they (the "seniors") are seldom entirely responsible for all the issues. It's mostly business constraints that forces cutting of corners and that ends up jeopardizing the business in the long run.