this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2023

132 points (96.5% liked)

Programming

17326 readers

150 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Follow the programming.dev instance rules
Keep content related to programming in some way
If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

snowe@programming.dev

Ategon@programming.dev

MaungaHikoi@lemmy.nz

132

One line of code caused AT&T to lose $60 million (engineercodex.substack.com)

submitted 11 months ago by rglullis@communick.news to c/programming@programming.dev

25 comments fedilink hide all child comments

top 25 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] drolex@sopuli.xyz 65 points 11 months ago (1 children)

If one single line of code can make you lose $60M, surely you'll ensure due review processes and independent QA and clear requirements and regular audits and a middle management not only doing KPI monitoring for a failing upper management. Right? Rrrright?

[–] BeardedGingerWonder@feddit.uk 11 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Hahahaha, you're kidding right? I shit you not, I've literally seen a single line change almost cost a company £150MM during testing because "we need to test in prod because the guy we need to run the test hasn't got access to the QA environment"

Best part was the actual change, there was a bug where a number that should've been divided by 100 was being multiplied by 100, the dev somehow managed to implement the fix in such a way that the number was multiplied by a further 100.

[–] snowe@programming.dev 2 points 11 months ago

Knight Capital Group lost $440 million in just 45 minutes due to a repurposed feature flag.

https://www.henricodolfing.com/2019/06/project-failure-case-study-knight-capital.html?m=1

Kinda makes the att one seem tiny in comparison.

[–] beefpeach@infosec.pub 51 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Recently, I paid ATT $500 to close my account and zero it out.

Fast forward 6 months, they send me a letter saying they need $300 more for cancellation fees or it will be sent to collections.

Write all the bad code you can, papi.

[–] heeplr@feddit.de 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Sure it's cancellation fees? This doesn't seem legal.

[–] olafurp@lemmy.world 5 points 11 months ago

There are contract breaking fees attached to contracts sometime to prevent switching providers. I'm pretty sure everybody agrees it reduces competition.

[–] boredtortoise@lemm.ee 26 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Someone should write more of those lines

[+] rglullis@communick.news -11 points 11 months ago (3 children)

So you want more people to lose full phone service?

[–] lemann@lemmy.one 12 points 11 months ago

Would get more people upset that they don't have an alternative (assuming this affects one of those cable monopoly communities)

[–] Sanctus@lemmy.world 12 points 11 months ago (1 children)

No, we're suffering, and most people just want these "people" with billions in revenue to pay their fair share instead of having twelve full time tax representatives whose only job is to make sure the public doesn't see a dime after using public spaces and resources all year.

[–] rglullis@communick.news -4 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

There are better and more effective ways to fight for justice besides just wishing that fines or that (a) do not really affect their bottom line, (b) can cause immense problems to the people who are mere customers and (c) will at most get one of their engineers fired but never point fingers to the manager who asked for the change to be expedited and pushed to production without review.

[–] Sanctus@lemmy.world 9 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I'm going to be real with you, over the last 80 years corporations have created an environment where they can levy their large profits to manipulate the government into passing beneficial legislature. I don't trust a single corporation anymore and I'd be more than happy to see them all burn, even if it means kissing our world goodbye. Every day I drive to work to make shit money with a degree I was told to get, my boss is pulling his 3rd home while he tells me I'm not worth 60k yet. But the average pay for my skills and degree is 65k, but nobody else will hire me. I'm incrementally closer to poverty each day and its maddening. Seeing such luxury while I'm six feet below the water fucks me up. I'm not asking for luxury, I'm asking to buy a house, to afford to provide well for my family. But that is even too much. So fuck it all. If I'm not allowed in the living club because of some birth lottery, or the universe coalescing to redirect an existing stream into my account, then I am going to be angry. There is nothing special about my boss besides the fact that he put down 30k from his GI bill when it mattered. Thats not a good fucking system, its the laws of the jungle but plastered in concrete. Fuck that.

[–] rglullis@communick.news -4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

First, a bit of perspective: you were born in the richest country of the world and your salary alone is enough to put your family above the median national income. If you have a working spouse making half of that, your family would be around the 70th percentile. And again, we are talking about the richest country of the world. So, please stop complaining about losing some "birth lottery".

Second, if the system has failed you, getting angry at some of the players can feel cathartic but is nothing more than a coping mechanism. It does little to nothing to actually find for a way to fix your problems. How can one help you to find a way to direct the energy from this anger to something productive?

[–] Lord_ToRA@lemmy.world 6 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Your argument of "other people have it worse" is pure ignorance at best.

Also, do you think one person has the ability to move the needle even a little towards fixing the issue? Getting angry is absolutely a step towards progress. We all need to be angry. We need to be angry enough to all work together and make a difference. Not everyone can spend the time needed to even attempt make a difference as an individual, but we can help rally together by 'complaining'

This all started as a joke and you took it way too seriously and now you're telling people they can't feel bad because they aren't suffering enough compared to others? Dude, cmon.

[–] rglullis@communick.news -2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

My point is: getting angry is not enough, and a competition to see who seems the angriest or says the most disparaging thing ends up becoming performative action.

What I'd like to see is people showing real skin in the game. Telcos in the US are running a racket and abuse their de-facto monopoly? Then how about we start looking into companies that provide mesh networks like Fon?

To put in real terms: I know for a fact that I could offer you unlimited phone calls for ~$15 month and have a healthy sustainable operation, but I need at least 100 people to sign up to this just to setup the basic infra. Everyone would be able to make and receive phone and texts, but they would lose some convenient features provided by larger carriers. Are you "so angry" at the big corporations that you'd be willing to go get these 100 people, or is your anger just enough to fuel some occasional rant on an internet forum?

[–] Lord_ToRA@lemmy.world 5 points 11 months ago (2 children)

My man's angry because he can't afford a house because big corps run our country and you're saying he's wrong because he's not creating his own telecom?

[–] rglullis@communick.news -3 points 11 months ago

Also, congrats on being the worst type of argumentative person: you said on the previous "getting angry is the first step to get organized", I give you one example where you can get organized and your response is a complete dishonest misinterpretation bullshit about "starting your own telecom".

This "so you're saying" crap is 100% a tell for the terminally online, intellectual-yet-idiots types who can do nothing but blame their failures on something else other than themselves. It's tiring.

[–] rglullis@communick.news -3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

No. I am saying that big corps run your country and you do nothing except being "angry". Try doing something about it, anything, but please stop acting like all you are able to do is cry on an online forum and misinterpret what other people say.

[–] Lord_ToRA@lemmy.world 3 points 11 months ago

Bro. Someone made a joke and look where you've taken this. Chill out.

[–] Lord_ToRA@lemmy.world 1 points 11 months ago

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/facetious

[–] drolex@sopuli.xyz 4 points 11 months ago

I work for the Atlantic and Pacific Telegraph Company, and I think I talk for everyone when I say: yes, why not

[–] spudwart@spudwart.com 13 points 11 months ago

Damn, if only the systems your phone network were ran on hadn't been forcibly closed source and scared good devs from interacting with you because of your sue-happy nature regarding BSD/Unix.

[–] 0x0@programming.dev 6 points 11 months ago

And it wasn't COBOL.

[–] Neato@kbin.social 5 points 11 months ago

We've had one, yes.

[–] darkfiremp3@beehaw.org 2 points 11 months ago

I feel like anyone doing any automation with aws could hit this