Has an ignorant kid broken your boxes? Have they ever
I've worked in the defence, finance, energy, transportation, medical, food, and general IT sectors over the past few decades, and almost every one of them has some variation of an "unsupervised new hire brings the company to a halt" story.
Bank trading floor brought down by a new hire plugging in incompatible equipment? Check.
Server room and business center evacuated because new hire thought the big red button was the "unlock the exit door" in the server room, when it was really the HALON fire system? Check. "Fortunately", the HALON actually malfunctioned on the new hire wasn't killed, at least.
Run the "build a hex file from the source tree and copy it to the EMPROM programmer" scripts in wrong order, and accidentally overwrite the project's entire, and not recently backed up, source code base? Check.
Start the test bench sequence in the incorrect order and start a small fire? Check.
Send confidential (fortunately only embarrassing and not legally concerning) information out company wide by using REPLY-ALL and attaching the wrong file? Check.
The details all differ, but the common problem was that an untrained and most importantly unsupervised new employee was given duties/responsibilities/access to resources far beyond their current state of knowledge, and/or training, and expected to have the same skill and knowledge as an experienced employee. In many cases, it wasn't even standard industry practices, but an in-house created, and usually arcane process that the company was convinced should be obvious and intuitive when it was anything but.
In looking at the aftermath of some of these disasters, my reaction has been "well, what did you expect?". In one case, the poor new hire had to execute a script that included warnings like "Does the J: drive have enough free space?", and "Is the M: drive mapped correctly?". How the hell is a new hire going to know what is enough free space, and what the correct drive mappings are?
In one case, the FNG (fricking new guy) was told to "run the script on the G: drive". When he asked what the script was called, he was told he'd know it when he saw it. He saw the script directory had half a dozen scripts with extremely similar names, picked the most likely one, and caused a near-catastrophe. In the end, it turned out IT had incorrectly mapped his drive letters, so his G: drive was mapped to a completely different system than it should have been. There was literally no way the poor guy could have even accessed the script he needed, he had no idea what it was called, and when he asked, he not only got zero help, he was called an idiot for not being able to figure it out.
While most supervisors blame the new hire for not being omniscient and magically knowing undocumented corporate lore, there have been some good ones. The best response I ever saw in this situation was the new hire, having caused high five figures of loss because of his actions, fully expected to be fired by his manager. The manager's boss, the VP, interjected, and said "why should we fire you? Your manager just spent $80,000 training you!", clearly showing that he understood the real fault lay with the manager and the lack of guidance provided.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
