23/01/2022
Top 3 Embarassing Mistakes in my Career.
By today, I’ve been in the software industry for more than 12 years, and let me tell you it has been quite a journey. I had my ups and downs, and gained a lot of experience along the way, forging me into the person I am now.
I figured now would’ve been a good time to share my accomplishments, but on second thought, wouldn’t it be better if I listed some of the mistakes I made throughout my career 😜Embarrassing as they may be, they were an essential part of my learning process, and I hope sharing them with you might be of some help to you wherever you are in your own journey.
1-Deleting a production database 🙄
This was one of my first experiences working in the gulf. I was outsourced to the customer site, and my job was to maintain the web application for a workflow management system. There were some issues with the app, and I was supposed to deploy the latest version. While working on it, a popup appeared asking me if I want to keep the old database, and without giving it a second thought, I clicked no!
I had very little experience at the time, and had no idea about the existence of a backup DB, and knowing the kind of trouble I’ve put myself in, I decided to keep it to myself and not inform my manager, pretending that nothing happened and hoping no one would notice. Long story short, it didn’t turn out as expected and I will leave the rest to your imagination 😬
2-Being rude to a customer
One time I was working on a portal when the customer reported a performance issue. So I followed the ordinary routine and added some logs and deployed on production. I checked the logs; everything checked out and the system was running smoothly and as expected. It turned out that it wasn’t my fault after all, and in the spur of the moment, I snapped at the customer, telling him that the application was working just fine and that they were the ones who needed to solve their network problems (By the way, the guy who was supervising the project was the Infrastructure Manager ☺️).
Eventually, I discovered that it was indeed all on me; I had added a wait function in the javascript code (for testing purposes) that was forcing the system to wait for 8 seconds.
3-Faking a cv for an interview
At that time, I was still a fresh graduate applying to a prestigious company. Needless to say, I exaggerated “a little” in my cv, adding like 10 programming languages from the internet, some of which I still don’t recognize till now, hoping this would increase my chances of getting accepted. I passed the initial written exam, and then an interview was scheduled, during which I was asked about some of those languages I claimed to have good knowledge of.
I panicked and tried to talk my way out of it by saying that I prepared this cv 2 months ago, and that it was my first cv so I kind of fabricated and tweaked it a little. I wish I could describe to you the shock that was on my interviewer’s face! He told me it was the first time he met someone who needs to remove stuff from his cv because it was old, as usually, people add stuff with time and not vice versa! It was the most awkward interview and obviously, I did not get the job 😂
In short, making mistakes is inevitable, and let’s face it, they don’t feel good, but they are an essential part of the process of growth and development. The rule here is pretty simple; the more you work, the more you will make mistakes, the more experienced you will be! What about you guys? What are your most embarrassing mistakes? And what did you learn from dealing with them?
