Throwback Thursday: rookie mistakes/misunderstandings #TBT

[#1]

It's Thursday!

It was on a 7 year old instance when I was first starting out learning how to administrate Jira. I had been a Jira user for all 7 years but not an admin. When I was shown the ropes, I didn't realize that some of the options for Post Functions were actually there because of 3rd Party Apps! In my naivety, I just thought all these came with Jira standard out of the box :)  

So, what rookie mistakes or misunderstandings did you experience or have seen?

Let’s make it a great Thursday!
KGM

[Andy Gladstone]

My most memorable rookie misunderstanding was when I started my first full-time job as an Operations Manager at a Real Estate Management firm. There were so many real estate terms that I had never heard or used before that I started peppering them in to conversations, without really understanding what they were. I remember when our leasing manager called me out and stopped me mid-sentence, asking me if I even knew what a soffit or mullion is. To which I had to admit I had absolutely no idea. She then gifted me with a Dictionary of Real Estate terms and implored me to look up every word I was not familiar with. That dictionary became very dog eared over the next year and half.

[Valerie Knapp]

I once accidentally deleted a Jira project from the wrong (customer) instance.... I was supposed to delete it from a sandbox / pre-prod (which had a different coloured background) and instead I deleted it from production! Luckily, there was a backup but my mistake caused a lot of people to have to do additional work to restore the project in production.

But I have to say, even though I felt TERRIBLE, my boss and my company were extremely compassionate and we used it as a learning opportunity. I have worked a lot of places before and since where that absolutely would not have been the case. So, I really appreciated that kindness and understanding that were extended to me.

Shout out to my former colleagues from @Actonic GmbH !

[Kristján Geir Mathiesen]

Great stories, @Andy Gladstone and @Valerie Knapp  Takk for sharing. Neat that both of them are about folks taking time to help out and, especially in Valerie's case, be super nice and encouraging. That's awesome!

[Tomislav Tobijas]

I believe there were many mistakes from my side, but I remember one Saturday a few years back, I was trying to customize something for one client (DC environment), as per their request, and I was editing CSS stylesheet or something like that.

Accidentally, I forgot to close <style> container and everything 'crashed'. You had to erase that value through the database and the database was managed completely by the client's infrastructure/DB team 🫠 So I had to wait until Monday for them to start working.
Luckily, it was only a test environment/not production, so it wasn't that big of a deal, but it wasn't a pleasant experience as well.
But, I guess you learn from your mistakes... so I decided to switch completely from on-prem to cloud environments and implementations 😅

[Kristian Klima]

Let's just say that I learned very early after starting as a journalist, in a fairly comical way, that when writing a newspaper article, words yesterday, today, and tomorrow mean something else for me and something else for the reader the next day.... and that you should always avoid them.

[Teodora V _Fun Inc_]

I was 18 when I started my first "real" job as a web store operator and very junior graphic designer. Once, my boss took me to a meeting with him, and while we were traveling to the meeting spot, he asked me to make a phone call on his behalf to inform the company we were visiting that we were running late.

Well, the next day, he gifted me a book on "how to do phone calls," and years later, he admitted that he almost fired me on the spot that day.

I will be forever thankful for this event, because it gave me the ultimate headstart into the craft of talking with partners and customers by failing dramatically from the first possible second :) 

[Matt Doar _Adaptavist_]

There are (were?) a few places in Jira Data Center where a page of errors is shown per instance. So I would clear all the errors thinking it was for the whole thing, then discover that it was just for that one node. Embarrassing when in front of a customer!

I think most of my mistakes are ones interacting with people, and those don't need to be public. Wince and learn, move on.

[Barbara Szczesniak]

Most of my teenage mistakes and misunderstandings involved my misinterpretation of the lyrics of rock songs. These were only embarrassing when someone who knew the actual lyrics overheard. I'd rather be corrected, though.

One mistake at an early job involved calling someone by the wrong name for about 2 months before someone corrected me. Since then, I feel it is perfectly valid in work and social settings to say, "I'm sorry, but I've forgotten your name." So much better than using the wrong name or no name at all.

[Kristján Geir Mathiesen]

Thanks all!

[Susan Waldrip]

Oh, gosh, so many to choose from.... I guess the "best" one was when I was learning a development environment and was given admin privileges to access what I needed, I right-clicked on a folder for all our Finance reports and intended to select something benign but accidentally selected Delete. No warning, no "Are you sure?", it was just gone. I didn't even realize it until an hour or so later when I went to find something and it wasn't there -- nothing was there! I called my boss, he laughed (speaking of having an understanding manager), and we contacted the server folks who were kind enough to restore it and not grumble. You know that wave of "Oh no!" that goes thru you in these situations? Well, I think I felt that for several days! 😱

[Ram Kumar Aravindakshan _Adaptavist_]

In my early days as a Software Developer, I successfully learnt how to crash a system by incorrect coding. However, I was also guided to learn how to recover the system without any data loss.

[John Funk]

When I first started as an admin, I believe I was changing out a workflow in a workflow scheme. Some of the statuses had been deleted in the new workflow, so at some point there was a mapping of the statuses between the two workflows. All of the statuses defaulted to Done in the new workflow from whatever was the status in the old workflow. I knew only one status had changed so I wasn't concerned with the other statuses. But there was a little box that said something to the effect of Do you want to do this for all of the other issues? I was thinking sure, I don't want it to change for just a single issue, so I checked the box. 

In a matter of seconds, every issue our Jira Cloud instance began to move to the Done status, no matter the project or the workflow. I was able to stop it after users began to report problems, but needless to say, I had THOUSANDS of issues to clean up!!

[Vronik]

Hi

My biggest mistake was not realizing that I was in a production instance and not the testing one. I started creating junk tasks, a board, etc. Luckily I did it in a new project that I was able to delete later and nothing happened except the anecdote.

Regards

[Weronika Hałdaś_Deviniti_]

Some time ago, I was looking for a workaround - I was convinced that using separate field contexts for the same project but different issue types would solve the problem. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that Jira doesn’t allow this! 😅
I don’t know why, but I was just absolutely sure it could be done that way.

Fortunately, as always, I tested this approach before sharing any suggestions, so I didn’t end up proposing something that’s actually impossible to achieve 🤦‍♀️

[Piyush Annadate _ACE Pune_]

Same here, not with workflow option, but with many more. Eventually, we should start the JIRA without plugin first and then the plugins - the view change is good for once