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Woah ! That's a chunk of change to toss down the drain !
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More like a chunk of change that didn't come up the pipes: Dave's job is to keep a money fountain working. When you're dealing with billion dollar capital investments, and dozens of workers for operation downtime gets horribly expensive really fast.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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That's peanuts compared to some of the guys 'mistakes'.
Everything from wiping out multi-million dollar compressors and gas turbines to shutting down 40% of the UK's oil and gas output. The latter obviously made a few people upset.
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Well, as long as you don't drop the internet. That would be catastrophic. 
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How's employment safety looking like?
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From what perspective....people hurting themselves or people's job security?
On the hurting themselves, things are very good, safety is a priority over everything else.
On the jobs, well that is up for debate, there is a skills shortage, but that doesn't remove the risk of an indiustry downturn and investment cuts result in projects pulled and units shutdown due to costs.
Over the next 20 years, decommissioning is going to be the growth arena I feel (in the NS at least).
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I was thinking of job security in the perspective that a mistake can make a lot of people freeze in the winter.
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For my first company many moons ago, I installed BlackIce on their website on a Friday with the default settings. The site was down for the weekend. Not much money was generated from our website, but still. 
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Yeah we suffer from 'Friday improvements' too. Also people here like to install major changes just before they go on a two week holiday - leaving the rest of us to mop up.
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Learned my lesson. 
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Bassam Abdul-Baki wrote: BlackIce
 I read that as BlackLace and instantly had visions of you lot dancing round the office singing Agadoo[^]
modified 24-Nov-14 14:33pm.
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You are going to be singing that all night now.
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I am going to bed very early tonight and am so not singing that all night.
No object is so beautiful that, under certain conditions, it will not look ugly. - Oscar Wilde
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Thanks a lot. I was happy never to have seen that video.
The girl had no idea what she was doing.
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Only have managed to destroy a couple of thousand(USD) in a day. I use to work in destructive testing and I miss judged the failure location. Thus losing instrumentation.
I now can cause endless grief as a DBA but usually I do not cost the company (too much) money.
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I destroyed one of only three existing protoypes of a new model of printer, by plugging the mains connector in one pin out, and putting 240VAC onto it's earth line.
While building it, the day it and both it's pals were due to be driven out to a 10 day trade show in Germany by the company owner...
Direct costs:
Print head £1000.
Dead as a dodo.
PCB: around £4000 as there were only three in existance (and one of them was rather flaky since it was the first build and had the most changes). All SMT, all built by hand, including a 0.4mm lead pitch 304 pin QFP processor of which 4 had been specially flown over from Japan for the build...
Very, very dead. Over 50% of the tracks vaporised...
Indirect costs: Unknown. Only two machines on a stand designed for three? Oops. 
In my defence, I immediately changed the company standard PCB mains connector so it couldn't happen again, and I had been working every hour there was for 5 months to get the hardware and software from "fag-packet" sketch to hardware.
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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OriginalGriff wrote: SMT, all built by hand, including a 0.4mm lead pitch 304 pin QFP
I pity the person that had to handle this migrane inducing reason to die job. 
"the debugger doesn't tell me anything because this code compiles just fine" - random QA comment
"Facebook is where you tell lies to your friends. Twitter is where you tell the truth to strangers." - chriselst
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It took her a while - about an hour of mental prep, and then about five minutes per device - most of which was visual checking under a strong glass.
Oh and she didn't drink the night before!
(She's sitting next to me as I as I post this)
The production models went through the SMT cooker, and as I had a higher failure rate until they got the temps / times right.
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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Good technicians are indeed a godsend! Even with nice optics, I still get a headache looking at the soldering job/part placement on prototypes.
OriginalGriff wrote: higher failure until they got the temps / times right
Ah, the fun of a new product. 
"the debugger doesn't tell me anything because this code compiles just fine" - random QA comment
"Facebook is where you tell lies to your friends. Twitter is where you tell the truth to strangers." - chriselst
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OriginalGriff wrote: (She's sitting next to me as I as I post this)
You met your Missus at work?
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No, I met her at the pub - she was going out with a friend of mine, until he decided to start smacking her around.
We started going out, and when the company I worked for needed another PCB assembler I suggested her. She became the prototype builder (because she was far and away the best at it) and was responsible for moving the company from leaded to unleaded solder before the EU directives came into force in 2001, and then into SMT from PTH.
We kept it professional at work, and customers never even knew unless they saw us out of work.
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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I've bricked some SBCs (not is the same day, though).
THESE PEOPLE REALLY BOTHER ME!! How can they know what you should do without knowing what you want done?!?!
-- C++ FQA Lite
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Most I can recall was accidently shutting down a production database and having all the call center staff idle for twenty minutes or so -- boss estimated it at 3000 USD or so.
It's his own fault... he asked me to write a script that would allow the operators to easily stop and start the database for backups. The script worked perfectly of course.
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Direct mistake was an unchecked auto generated document with a spelling mistake - recieve rather than receive - that went through a production run. Around 20,000 letters to be converted to fire lighters.
Indirect would be a bug feature in a piece of software that brought a retail banks card system down on Christmas Eve. In my defence, my part was providing balances for authorisation online and the card system should have switched to offline limits rather than nacking everything.
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