During a recent conversation with one of my staff, they expressed concerns about the consequences of making mistakes, fearing potential disciplinary action or even termination. To allay their fears, I reassured them that as long as they weren’t acting maliciously, making mistakes was a normal part of the learning process and wouldn’t result in any negative consequences. As Roger Skaer famously said, “the more you [experiment], the more you learn!”.

While it is important to establish boundaries for junior engineers when it comes to accessing a client’s network, there is still room for them to explore and learn under the guidance of senior engineers. With proper supervision and training, these opportunities for exploration should not pose a significant problem. It is essential to strike a balance between encouraging learning and minimizing any potential risks to the client’s network.

During our conversation, some senior engineers and I shared stories of mistakes we’ve made in the past to emphasize that errors are inevitable in IT work over time. In this context, I also shared a video by Tom Scott called “Onosecond” which humorously illustrates the brief moment between making a mistake and realizing the error, which we can all relate to in our work. It was a reminder that mistakes are a normal part of the learning process and that we can learn from them to become better professionals.

I recently shared a post about the time I restored a virtual server, accidentally replacing the production server and losing nearly a day’s worth of data. In my haste to ensure that the NICs were disconnected during the restore process, I made a critical mistake – I accidentally restored the server in place, causing the live server to be instantly removed. As a result, the company lost all the work they had done since the last backup, which was around 17 hours earlier. A perfect example of the onosecond at play!