How programmers ruined the online games company

In July 2010, I worked for an online game company in California. At that time I just graduated, in the true sense, this is my first job. I have salary income, have my own dormitory. For the first time I think I grew up.

I am one of two "engineers" writing code for the company's flagship product, an RPG. What I learned in college is philosophy, which shows that although I know how to think and solve a problem, I lack the knowledge of best practices, design patterns, and so on. I fully rely on the basic knowledge of LAMP, paid a great deal of enthusiasm for them.

The game's designer (our boss) often draws inspiration from Blizzard's world-famous game World of Warcraft. At that time, "Raids" in World of Warcraft play aroused unprecedented excitement and passion in the player. This is something we especially want to copy in our game.

I was assigned to implement Raids in our game. Colleague Sam was entangled in a lot of reconstruction work, so I was fortunate to have the opportunity to develop some new exciting things.

One of the hallmarks of our development environment is that our development code is directly linked to the production library. In retrospect, this is really difficult to understand, I did not even ask why this is really a joke.

I use a MySQL client to view the database tables, this tool has a flashy OSXy interface ... far less than phpmyadmin. Part of my testing involves manually clearing the RAIDS table and rebuilding it with the program.

The dullness of this work left me in a trance, a lazy afternoon, and I found myself drowsy, moving the mouse cursor over the USERS Express icon and popping up the right-click menu and clicking 'clear'.

The serious consequences of what I did did not immediately knock me down. At first I just felt a Soul Out, as if I was floating in a dark room and saw my colleagues hooked up on a gleaming display.

So, what exactly is the consequence? Our game has tens of thousands of paying users. Users spend money on equipment to enhance their game's character. All of these people's data are placed in the USERS table, now gone.

About a minute later, a business manager came in. "I feel something went wrong," she said. I replied, "Yes, I know what went wrong."

I found myself leaning against a desk to call the database provider Rackspace for support and patiently listening to their engineers explaining that the backup of our database instance had stopped two months ago. what!

Afternoon, a layer of thick and dense depressing melancholy filled the office of the sky. We all know what went wrong, but only a few people knew what the problem was. I was dragged into an emergency meeting of "engineer + leader" held in the conference room.

The CEO sat obliquely across the table, looking at my face and saying, "You fucking good thing! You make us lose millions of dollars in revenue." His partnership (to attend meetings remotely via Skype) inserts the phrase "You pray for yourself."

The entire company is doing disaster mitigation control over the next few days. Game development and operation of the work all stopped. Technical staff try to restore the USERS table as much as possible through the data relationships in other datasheets. Non-skilled workers cope with angry customers, making notes for those who claim to remember their game data. I simply did not go home these days. All smelled

There is no public information that I have to be solely responsible for this. Everybody received an email saying it was a "junior programmer" liability incident. Only me and one other person in the company are considered "junior programmers."

Not more than three days, it is clear that everyone knows it is me. We began to look at me with a strange vision. A few people expressed their sympathy. But most people are more angry and distrustful. For them, this company offers them the best job opportunities. I pushed the company into trouble, at the same time pushing their well-being and livelihoods to a standstill.

I am depressed, full of guilt and ashamed. In a "company-wide" conference, I openly apologized. Someone applauded.

A month later, finally, I wrote a resignation letter to the CEO and the project manager. I left the city and went straight to New York.