The cost of your mistake

I got a new project recently that related to money transaction and conversions. And of course during the first week of working, I have already made a lot mistakes.  What is bad about those mistakes for me is that because we don’t have a “staging” environment, and I have to work with real “production” cases, every mistake I make is a financial loss to the company – how much will they cost the company?

It sounds like a very broken design, doesn’t it? I went to the boss to clarify that and got the answer that it’s better for the company to have some losses now in order to deliver new features faster.  This is a new mindset for me.  I am going this way now, but I can’t shake a feeling of remorse when I make a mistake.  After I made a new one last week that caused more loss than the salary they’re paying me, I felt uncomfortable again and still it seems that nobody cared.  I did a little bit research about “the price of mistakes”.

I understand that in surgery the cost of a mistake can be much different that in my humble vocation, so I limited my research to “program code mistakes”, and this is what I found:


1.     4 June 1996 $370 000 000 caused by an integer overflow error
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_(spacecraft)

2.    3 December 1999, Mars Polar Lander. $328 000 000 caused by an uninitialized variable

3.    There are a lot of such stories in the aerospace and flight industry (50+ cases), so I tried to find other areas, and it was easy.

4.    Pensions and welfare: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/3235394.stm
5.    American electricity blackout in 2003: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003
6.    Medicine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25

The last one is especially terrible in my opinion. Patients received more radiation then prescribed due to bad software.  I don’t know why, but this is more intimidating to me than the rocket crash.

The idea that something can slowly kill you because of an obtuse programmer is especially scary because everything nowadays is controlled by computer programs.

I wanted to comfort myself about my mistakes with this research, but it looks like I made things even worse. Now I am glad that I don’t write code for hospitals and that all my mistakes are only about money.  However, now I’ve trust in anyone’s else code.

Have you run into bugs that influenced your life?