Dear Intern,

Forgot to mention, I DELETED the PROD database today. Not on purpose. I thought I was on my local. Autopilot error. Happens to everyone. I had it fixed so fast that no one knows except me and all of you. Not my first time either. Senior dev.

— Chrispian H. Burks (@chrispian) June 18, 2021

Dear Intern, I was using my desktop calendar to make a monthly note of when I started my menstrual period, but after several months I realized I was making that note on a calendar I shared with all of my colleagues company wide. I was 37 years old.

— Caissie (@Caissie) June 18, 2021

Dear intern,

This was NOT your fault. You were just the one unlucky enough to discover a hole in your teams process. The real error was that it was possible for this to happen in the first place. The product will be better thanks to you.

— Rose W (@rose_w) June 18, 2021

Dear Intern, when I was 25 I made a PDF assigning each employee to the Muppet they reminded me of the most. I meant to send it to my work friend, but I accidentally sent it to the entire company. My supervisor (Beaker) wanted to fire me, but the owners (Bert & Ernie) intervened. https://t.co/zMKvQ6nxjj

— aerin. (@AerinChevyFord) June 18, 2021

Dear Intern,

When I was in 3rd grade, the 5th grade teacher burned a marijuana pill to teach kids what it smelled like (just say no! Etc) She forgot to extinguish it all the way. All the evacuated students got to watch her be escorted by firefighters from the building, sobbing.

— royal azure possum (@krisis86) June 19, 2021

Dear Intern,
As an intern I accidentally left the UV light on in the lab (which can melt literally everything). I remembered in the middle of the night, ran to lab, set off the silent alarm & was nearly arrested in my penguin flannel pajamas (the light burned out. Thank goodness)

— Open Ocean Exploration (@RebeccaRHelm) June 18, 2021

Dear intern,

It’s ok. I dropped a prod database when I was a senior engineer. These things happen more often than you might think. Building good systems is about having resilience against human mistakes. Because we, humans, always make mistakes.

— JBD ヤナ ドガン (@rakyll) June 18, 2021

Dear Intern,
I once didn’t recognize then-VP George HW Bush and almost didn’t let him into a meeting…in the Cabinet Room. Of The White House. Where he worked. 🤷🏼‍♀️
He was actually as gracious as HBO Max Help appears to be being…you’ll be fine.

— ͏Postcards4USA (@postcards4USA) June 18, 2021

Dear intern,

I once globally took down Spotify. It almost happened twice. My team was awesome about it and I'm still here. You managed to find something broken in the way integration tests are done. It's a good thing and will help improve things. Good luck <3.

— Daenney (@daenney) June 18, 2021

Dear intern,

I once sent out a 1-900 sex hotline as a conference call number for the Women's National Democratic Club, the average age of membership was about 78.

Shit happens.

— Rae Pickett (@RaeRoca) June 18, 2021

Dear Intern,

In the first month of my new HR job with a major defense contractor, I sent out an email about shirt orders that included the division president and several corporate leaders.

Title of email: Your Shit is in the HR Office - Please Pick Up by COB

— Hannah Holloway (@hholloway2010) June 18, 2021

As an actual hired employee I changed the last name of everyone at the company in the HR system to “Holland”. A change which required them to restore the database from a backup.

This was during my first week.

❤️

— Burke Holland (@burkeholland) June 18, 2021

❤️💛❤️One time we forgot where we parked the Wienermobile so we got your back❤️💛❤️

— Oscar Mayer (@oscarmayer) June 18, 2021

Dear Intern:

Once, when I was a junior copywriter, I applied to my dream job at @TheAtlantic and wrote “copyrighter” on my résumé. Like, I misspelled the job I wanted, which was a job for good spellers.

You’re doing great, okay?

— Angela Mayfield (@pinkrocktopus) June 18, 2021

Dear Intern,

I once forgot which browser tab I was in and shut down all the servers I had just put into prod instead of the ones I had just pulled out of the load balancer.

While the CTO was giving a presentation using the live site; in the nearest conference room to my desk.

— Laukidh (@laukidh) June 19, 2021

Dear intern,
On my first day at my first ever coding job, I deleted the company's entire Dropbox. I thought I'd be fired but my boss restored the folder from a backup and told me that if I could have deleted everyone's work that would've been on the company, not me!

— Kevin Liao (Liāu ka-kî) (@sleepy_dugong) June 18, 2021

Dear intern, I once set up a load test that accidentally sent 10,000 queries per second to https://t.co/mWSx1RtJMg.
Another time, a bug in my code caused the Google local business search index to drop 500K random locations.
I'm now an Engineering Director.
Own it, learn, & grow.

— Sameer Ajmani 💉💉🎉 (@Sajma) June 19, 2021

What's up intern?
I've worked at Pixar and Oculus on roughly 8 films. At least 3 of them were deleted by someone on the team and had to be restored from backups. It happens. A lot. 10 years from now this will be a funny story you tell your interns.
Best,
Every engineer

— Chris Horne (@chornesays) June 18, 2021