Whats the biggest error someone junior in your team has ever done and what do you do with it?

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Manager missed the filing deadline for an RFP response valued at $1.5mm by an hour because she went to lunch. Lost a sure win, the RFP was a formality but they couldn’t reopen it just for one company. Biggest pain ever... we finally did get the work, six weeks later when the winner of the bid pulled out during negotiations due to lack of experienced staff, at which point the client was able to sole source it.
Manager runs the engagement, turned it around, won add-on work, is the client’s darling and is going to be promoted this year.

likeuplifting

Someone in my team forgot a factor of 2 while designing the size of a warehouse (think like a Home Depot on site warehouse for extra stock). It was rolled out across a region for the pilot and now every employee has to use ladders to get the stock, instead of the original 6ft height intended 😂😂 It was an ‘oh shit’ moment for the team but when the client didn’t care and everyone laughed about it

likefunny

Similarly, I have heard of us losing a railway client because somebody forgot a factor of 2 when calculating the maintenance budget...

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McK is deciding on the whip or the noose.

likefunny

Biggest error was probably that they were human. I only staff supreme beings.

likefunnysmart

Screwed up something for client, minor error, but when they mistake surfaced, they responded with a huge email, extremely defensive, placing blame squarely on manager by name (who had nothing to do with the error, directly nor indirectly in an oversight capacity) and continued to double down on strange defensiveness. All anyone had needed to do was reply back that the team would sort everything out ASAP. Instead this person freaked the hell out and started in on the “name and shame” blame routine.

A couple days later on a Friday they were told they were going to have a meeting with their manager on Monday about how they handled the incident. They burst into a screaming match with the “messenger” and refused to leave the office unless the manager would speak to them NOW and proceeded to storm down the hall stamping their feet muttering about how they had never done anything wrong, it was the manager. Had a tantrum all the way to the manager’s office and refused to leave, standing outside the office door. Manager told them to go home and it’d be discussed Monday. They refused. Had to be escorted out. This was all in front of clients.

They were fired the week after.

The mistake itself was so trivial it would have never been discussed again. It’s more about how you recover, handle, and learn from mistakes in life than the mistakes that you make (within reason)

likefunny

Entitled snow flakes? Sounds horrific.

Identified dissenters of the state on social media. No punishment

likefunnyuplifting

Oh there was punishment. For them

likesmart

"Shame...
Shame...
Shame..."

likefunny

a few months out of undergrad and my first client asked how long I’d been with my firm and I told them

likefunny

I told a clients customer once that i was here for less than two years (which technically wasn’t wrong) and then they added me on linkedin clearly seeing i had just graduated from college

Once an analyst made a mistake in our analysis for an evil government so innocent people had to go to jail

likeuplifting

Compared to a job well done by McK with the same result.

likefunny

Wow why is everyone so bitter today...

likehelpful

Was NOT a big deal but I was helping an intern work through a predictive model (random forest). I had already trained the model and needed him to run predictions against new data. He got an error message and just decided to run my code earlier in the script - which trained a NEW useless model against the NEW data. He then ran the rest of the code and triumphantly informed me that he was able to generate predictions... which obviously had to all be thrown out...

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You know that for people who haven’t coded before saying ‘Google it’ doesn’t help, especially for an intern? If you spent 10 min explaining, you could have saved yourself and your intern a full day of work

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Staffed MBA student on one of my projects - in client meeting he was not willing to take notes - this was not why he went to University (he did this openly with cliënt in the room) - got kicked of the project

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I had one of those. Not only did he refuse to take notes he also refused to make lists, like to do lists. I’d literally be making his lists for him

Basically every junior who has touched code and didn't have an eagle eyed team looking out for them has caused some cascading failure. Hopefully it's on some unimportant microservice, not on generating a report that defines global strategy... But either way, mistakes will happen. Correct, make sure they understand, move on

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...and yet. Lol

Oh I remember one of my own - faked that there was data available to conduct analysis required for something client wanted because I was too lazy to actually find out if it was, we won add on work based on it, turned out there was no data available, I was put on it as a punishment, finally figured a roundabout way of getting results and was eventually able to deliver it. But was quite traumatic

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I haven’t seen anything disastrous yet. The worst was make a modelling mistake that spat out wrong numbers which were presented to client on a cost cutting project - which is often considered blasphemous
The person was just yelled at (not by me, by the director) for a good 10 minutes and that did wonders.
I have seen others getting rolled off projects etc. for screwing things up big time but dont think those are for specific tasks - just general non performance
Not very dramatic - maybe others might have something worse.

likehelpful

My first gig I was doing performance testing (solo resource). I set up one wrong parameter and it spit out great numbers (meeting the SLAs). Once I discovered the mistake, it was not going to meet SLAs. I let my PM know and apologized, and was commended. Apparently many would keep it to themselves and be discovered much later.

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Someone on my team sent sensitive data from one client to another client accidentally. Several partners had to get involved

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I accidentally deleted a 1000 line SQL script that was used to update our models. The consultant on my team had a 2 week old back-up but still took 48 hours to get the model backup and running.

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I hope you guys started committing your code every day after that

Someone forgot to pull a formula down all rows in a business case and it resulted in us overestimating savings and underestimating investment by $1M total. Wasn’t discovered until the analyst who built the model had left the firm, but was discovered and had to be communicated to the client.

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Client asked if he was a God and he said “No”...

funny

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