The idolization of Steve Jobs has a lot of issues, and this might be a good example of one. We don't know whether Apple succeeded in spite of or because of Steve's management behaviors.
It's also worth noting that the original Mac (the same time period most of those 'crazy Steve' stories originate from) was a huge commercial 'meh'.
Not to mention NeXT, which also had its share of "crazy Steve" management, and which would have been an unmitigated failure if Apple hadn't bought them out.
If you're interested in that story, Randall Stross' book Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing (http://www.amazon.com/Steve-Jobs-Next-Big-Thing/dp/068912135...) is a good telling of it. (It was written before Jobs' return to Apple and subsequent huge success, so it's a fascinating artifact of the time before he became Saint Steve.)
Whereas most people in this situation would be qualified as assholes (and rightly so), Steve Jobs gets a mild look of disapproval. For me, "awkward" does not begin to convey how screwed up that is. It seems that people have a real hard time accepting that the guy they worship for delivering some of their gadgets was in fact a major douchebag.
This tendency to make Jobs into a person he was not it very disturbing. Of course, on HN you risk being banned for saying something bad about His Holiness because some of its highly ranked people are also members of the cult of Apple, but that alone should not be a reason to tip-toe around the obvious.
I would also add "don't be a complete asshole" as an additional requirement. Obviously that was not good code, but good managers encourage people to make mistakes so they can learn from them (as long as it isn't mission critical stuff)
While I totally agree with you, this example goes beyond that. Whether it's in public or in private, calling someone a "retard" and asking them how they could do something "so fucking stupid" is inexcusably abusive and a reason to quit on the spot, at the very least.
Humiliation is poison in a work environment. There is no quicker way to make people resent their jobs, stop interaction, create hate and mistrust and send a signal that "you don't matter".
I would think the code base suffers as well. I'd tend to avoid code reviews, or at least not actively seek them out, if public humiliation was par for the course.
That's not just startups where that happens. Senior developers, especially the "man in a box" geniuses that don't work well with anyone else are downright abusive of other developers (and God help the poor customer support or QA people that talk to them).
On the other hand, guys I really respect just call those "rookie mistakes" and expect them to happen. Hopefully you catch them in code review before customers are impacted.
One of W. Edwards Deming's "Lesser Categories of Obstacles" contends that the system designed by management is responsible for 85% of mistakes and unintended consequences in a business, while workers are responsible for about 15% (src: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming#Seven_Deadly... ). Deming's 8th Point of Management is to drive out fear so that everyone can work effectively for the company (src: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming#Key_principl... ). Publicly humiliating the programmer seems to be simultaneously disregarding the symptoms of a systemic issue (namely, a lack of code reviews) and putting everyone on the team into a state of fear.
Wow, a surprising number of comments on that blog post agree with the manager.
Ya, it's a stupid bug, but the way the manager dealt with it was totally out of line. Whether or not that "style" of management results in better output is moot, you just don't treat people like that. It's not like the developer shot the manager's dog or anything.
Please can you increase the font size on your blog? Not only does small size font make no sense, it is also unreadable for me (chrome, Windows): http://i.imgur.com/TZUVi.jpg
Anywhere from 16px to 22px would be fine, we are here to read the text afterall. It's the focus!
I could make it more readable by tweaking my settings. But that only helps me. Asking people to remember to make stuff accessible helps everyone who needs it.
I hope no company YC makes this mistake, considering How to Win Friends and Influence People [0] is recommended reading in YC [1].
For example: Don't criticize, condemn, or complain. and Let the other person save face.
That is, criticize in private, give praise in public (give the person a fine reputation to live up to). Calling someone a retard is a counter-productive thing to do.
Code reviews are just opportunities for institutionalized bike-shedding.
And in cases like this ensures further humiliation.
Instruction can work, but it requires a smart programmer who can do it right. Collaboration can work but it reduces the speed you can think at to how fast two people can communicate instead of how fast one person can think.
And no, I don't have good solution (other than to ensure you only hire the best people).
Absolutely. We have code reviews because we all make mistakes. Sometimes really dumb ones.
It's crazy to be mad at a programmer for a bug in their code found during a code review. Discuss it, learn from it, and not only does the code get fixed, everyone involved becomes a better programmer by some small amount.
The only time it's justifiable being mad is if something gets through code reviews and into production - and at that point it's not the programmer's fault, it's the fault of procedure which enabled buggy code to ship undetected. So you get mad at the system, review the failure and fix it.
In the UK employers have a legal duty of care to protect their employees from harm in the workplace, and this includes stress.
This is written in law, and has been supported by court cases.
One incident like that is wrong, but could perhaps be explained by someone having a really bad day. Recognition, apology, and no further incidents would help.
But continued incidents? The company is leaving themselves open to lawsuits. ("Constructive dismissal" and employment tribunal in the UK.) I'm pretty sure that toxic work environment leading to poor health is something that has been through US courts.
I mention this because sometimes the only way you get through to PHBs is to talk about costs and risks, and not "don't let employees be dicks to other employees".
I'm not agreeing in any way with the manager in this situation; public humiliation of employees by managers is both morally cowardly (bullying someone from a position of power) and ineffective over the long run (in my opinion). But still, stress happens in most jobs. Often times it is caused by a combination of home and work factors. It's ridiculous to make "preventing stress" a legal duty of employers, because that's not wholly within an employers control. Example: Faulty machine used to serve customers blows up at work at now you have a lot of angry customers. Stress ensues.
In this context "stress" means "bad stuff that could be controlled but isn't" - it's different from "adrenaline rush caused by tight (but achievable) deadlines" or "employer trying hard but things go wrong".
Employers are expected to have procedures in place to deal with things like sexual harassment. This is similar, they're expected to have procedures in place to deal with bullying.
I agree that I might have made it sound stronger than it is. In real life it's pretty reasonable.
It wouldn't be unreasonable to suggest that the stress (and business impact) could be reduced by making sure any critical machine has a hot-backup should it fail.
Making sure employees are happy and safe in their work is good business.
Humiliation is not isolated to startups. In fact every industry has these type of characters. Such behaviour is not the best method of motivating your team. Sadly it exists.
What will you do differently next time?
Would you call this behaviour out to your other manager or directly to the perpetrator?
If you want to avoid it happening again you should speak up. Unless you don't mind the abuse?
Similar humiliations used to happen to me at my first job. It was the first time I was programming professionally and made a few mistakes that would've cost the startup a lot. On my second week opn the job, I commented out, by mistake, the initialization of variable $user (arrrgh!!). The website crashed on all the signed-in users. My boss being the stressed nerv-ball that he was crictized me in the same way described in the article.
I think there's a lesson to be taken here. Not for managers (clearly good management would criticize privately) but for the employee. Learn to take a yell. It's not good style but it's widely common, people above you scream at you when you screw up. Learn not to take it personal, and not to let such incidents affect your passion for your work. The yelling is bad form, but it's not direct criticism at you. In large entreprises, it's the result of a chain of screaming starting at the top. In startups it's the result of the nerve-wrecking stress, founders go through.
'Constructive criticism' is an advice we give would-be managers, but it's a luxury starting employees rarely get. You're lucky if you meet one such boss in your career. Learn to take criticism, the bad kind, leaving out the humiliation. I found the best way to cut a yelling short is by answering loudly: "You're right I screwed up, I'm sorry. At least now I learned it, it won't happen again". After getting yelled at like this a few times, you'll realize it's really not against you, and such an answer would calm down your boss quickly; make sure not to make that mistake again, because then you'd really deserve a humiliation ;). This is easier said (written?) than done, but it's a natural part of one's career. I take it as a mental strength test.
Also, you won't be the junior on the team forever. One day you'll be responsible for an intern screwing up. Remember that moment and don't be too harsh.
Never EVER say "I should be fired for this". You probably mean it as a little joke. Getting yelled at for screwing up is not the right time to make a joke. Unless of course you are serious, in which case you're an idiot.
Saying something that weird will just make it seem like you don't care or you're weird.
The fact you say you 'find it best' suggests you get shouted at a lot or you are making this up. Either way, you shouldn't be dispensing this kind of nonsense advice to other people who may well follow it.
From my experience humour is not tolerated on HN, everyone takes themselves very seriously. If you tell a joke you risk being downvoted into oblivion and/or banned. So yeah, your comparison with a concentration camp might actually be appropriate in this case, at least in terms of atmosphere.
> On my second week opn the job, I commented out, by
> mistake, the initialization of variable $user (arrrgh!!).
> The website crashed on all the signed-in users.
I'm trying to imagine a professional, well run software shop that would actually hold you responsible for this. I can not. It seems to me that for this to have happened, many things must have gone wrong, or many professional practices must have been completely missing:
1.) there were no code reviews
2.) there were no unit tests
3.) there were no functional tests
4.) no one noticed any problems on the development site
5.) there was no QA person, or the whole QA team somehow failed to test this
6.) there were no 3rd party testing services that might have caught this (like Airbrake), nor any in house error logging services (errbit)
I could go on. I'm trying to imagine how a programmer comments out the $user variable and that change makes it all the way to production without anyone noticing. I think a lot of things have to wrong, all through the organization, before that becomes possible.
I read your story and I have 2 quick thoughts:
1.) I have made many worse mistakes (thought I was changing database password for dev, in the config file, but actually changed it for production)
2.) None of my worst mistakes ever made it to production, because the company had some process that caught them before such a change ever got pushed to production.
No programmer can avoid mistakes. That simply isn't possible. To insist that a programmer always write perfect code would be like insisting that an NBA basketball player make 100% of his 3 point shots: the world would be a very different place if it was possible to insist on perfection.
A well run organization has multiple checks that ensure mistakes made in development don't make it to production. Any organization that puts 100% responsibility on one programmer is taking a 100% certain risk that eventually some terrible mistake will make it to production.
Some organizations put more responsibility on individual programmers and some organizations put less. That is fine. A range of strategies can be defended. But if an organization wanted to shift most of the responsibility onto a single programmer, then they would also have to give that programmer broad latitude regarding time, so that the programmer can implement whatever they feel is necessary to ensure the robustness of the code (for instance, unit tests, functional tests, setting up automated uptime checks, etc). I'm guessing, from what few details are written above, that the above commenter both had responsibility for the code but was also under pressure to move quickly and shove stuff out the door. Under such circumstances, management needs to take 100% responsibility if something goes wrong.
Now I will qualify everything I said above with an anecdote: In 2005, when working at monkeyclaus.org, we had a little startup where I was the only programmer and we would push my changes straight to the "live" site. But we hadn't really launched yet and the few dozen users we had were just friends of ours, so the "live" site was really a "dev" site.
I had extensive experience with bullies in school and let me tell you being submissive or showing fear of any kind only brings out the worst in them. I know you can't throw the boss against the wall (which would get a school bully of your back) but at least don't make it worse.
And no, I hope you will not stay long enough in a place like that. There are better jobs elsewhere. Shoveling shit isn't as bad as that.
Of course if it was a one time thing and the manager apologized (in public) that is another thing.
I can't believe that you are actually accepting this abuse and recommend to others to just suck it up. Management has a lot of responsibilities. Screaming at their subordinates isn't one of them.
The people on that page that are saying the abuse as well deserved are part of the problem.
Sure, it's not good code, and causes problems in production. It's certainly not the right way to do this -- but constructive criticism, gentle corrections, and rewards/acknowledgements of successes when they occur are far more effective in the long run than this public tirade bullshit. AFAIC, the PM that humiliates an employee in public for any reason is (a) immature, (b) short-sighted, (c) unprofessional, (d) a poor choice for a PM, and likely (e) insecure and feels the need to strut his/her intellectual "superiority" in front of others lest their authority/superiority be called into question.
I also would have quit on the spot -- life is far, far too short to deal with that kind of crap, and there are other work environments in our field where one can do what one enjoys and where it's okay to be a fucking human being instead of being viewed as merely a code generation resource that can be kicked around when it doesn't "behave."
The proper response to that kind of public humiliation is "Okay, you're right, it was a pretty stupid thing to do. But not as stupid as abusing your employees and creating an environment where the primary motivators are grounded in FUD. I'll collect my things from my desk because...how to communicate this part adequately...oh yeah: fuck you."
Would this have helped how you feel better?
Or would you feel the same way?
"This is retarded! There's no delay in the while loop. How many times does the client have to connect to the DB per second? Thousands! I can't believe this implementation is so fucking stupid!"
In this case we try to refer to the code directly, taking our reference to the person.
"You retard! There's no delay in your while loop. How many times do you think the client can connect to the DB per second? Thousands! I can't believe you'd do something so fucking stupid!"
Wow, was it that hard to keep it down a little? see:
"Dude there's no delay in your while loop. How many times do you think the client can connect to the DB per second? Thousands! go fix that"
See? is not sugar-coating it, simply not being a gigantic asshole about it.
I think with anyone who cares about doing good work, simply asking the questions that will lead the person to realize what a fuckup it is should be enough.
> "How many times do you think the client can connect to the DB per second? Thousands!"
Is this a source of concern for the DB? If it is, you might want to consider limiting connections on one side or the other at a deeper level. Self-inflicted DoS bugs during development aren't fun, but actual DoS attacks in production are even less fun. If there's a potential way to bring your DB to its knees and you get popular enough for trolls (let alone actual crackers) to take notice (and if you're writing video games that presumably have high score boards or something similar this isn't that unlikely) expect people to find it.
It's good to get yelled at some number of times throughout your life to help you grow a thicker skin, but I've never been yelled at in the work environment. If it occurred I'd be strongly motivated to quit like others here. Stating matter-of-factly "That was stupid" is one thing, joking and exaggerating stupidity of yourself or others is another (and is dependent on implicit understanding of such and also requires a certain culture of the group), but when it gets to a manager actually screaming at you about a possibility of something bad happening then that's the line, at least for me. If I wanted to get screamed at, I'd join the military.
The behavior you experienced from the "manager" was, at best, grossly inappropriate. It may or may not help now, but I think it's important to be mindful of where other peoples' perspective is. The "shoe on the other foot" mentality sounds like it has been forgotten both both the manager and you. It's a two-way street.
Unfortunately I've done something similar to this to some outsourced contractors in India as we were doing a final code review of their deliverables. I regret it still and have tried to make amends. On the one hand we're paying them good money to do work we don't have time to do ourselves so at the time I felt it was ok and warranted. On the other hand they're human beings just like me with feelings and pride and i took them down a notch in front of their peers. Yes, I'm a better coder than them, yes we were paying them lots of money for work I felt should have been better. But the way I went about it was totally wrong. Sucks but at least I learned from it.
> It makes me sad to see recent portrayals of Silicon Valley hold up humiliation as a recipe for success.
This is an interesting statement in the article and I think it is worth bringing up. It contrasts significantly to the other article I just read that said that "public shaming", which is just another word for public humiliation, is a desirable practice needed to stem the existential threat to engineering of "brogrammers".
I don't know about Steve Jobs but every company Ive been in where this has started to become the culture it has been a sign of a sinking ship... and every time that sign was accurate.
If you think public humility is motivating it probably is in the short term. But its the most motivating for getting that resume spruced up again.
Perhaps a good way for such a rookie mistake to be handled would be to turn this in to playful ribbing. (WAT? WTF?)
I too have been the subject of manager outbursts like this. Only do it if you're deliberately trying to get rid of the person, and if you're doing that, be aware of the precedent you're setting. There's too many things to know about programming for any one person to be expert in everything, and never make a WTF mistake.
71 comments
[ 7.9 ms ] story [ 138 ms ] threadIt's also worth noting that the original Mac (the same time period most of those 'crazy Steve' stories originate from) was a huge commercial 'meh'.
If you're interested in that story, Randall Stross' book Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing (http://www.amazon.com/Steve-Jobs-Next-Big-Thing/dp/068912135...) is a good telling of it. (It was written before Jobs' return to Apple and subsequent huge success, so it's a fascinating artifact of the time before he became Saint Steve.)
Also I didn't know (before that) that he refused to pay his daughter's tuition and some friends of his wife had to do it instead.
Awkward at the least...
This tendency to make Jobs into a person he was not it very disturbing. Of course, on HN you risk being banned for saying something bad about His Holiness because some of its highly ranked people are also members of the cult of Apple, but that alone should not be a reason to tip-toe around the obvious.
On the other hand, guys I really respect just call those "rookie mistakes" and expect them to happen. Hopefully you catch them in code review before customers are impacted.
Ya, it's a stupid bug, but the way the manager dealt with it was totally out of line. Whether or not that "style" of management results in better output is moot, you just don't treat people like that. It's not like the developer shot the manager's dog or anything.
Anywhere from 16px to 22px would be fine, we are here to read the text afterall. It's the focus!
(ctrl + mouse-wheel for me)
e: VVV Good point.
> so afraid of being publicly railed-on that they wrote pretty much bug-free code all the time.
That's a non sequitur. Programmers try to write bug-free code all the time anyway. No one tries to introduce bugs.
For example: Don't criticize, condemn, or complain. and Let the other person save face.
That is, criticize in private, give praise in public (give the person a fine reputation to live up to). Calling someone a retard is a counter-productive thing to do.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Win_Friends_and_Influen...
1: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5584 (can't find where I read it, but this thread points to pg recommending it)
Code reviews, instruction, and collaboration help make better code.
And in cases like this ensures further humiliation.
Instruction can work, but it requires a smart programmer who can do it right. Collaboration can work but it reduces the speed you can think at to how fast two people can communicate instead of how fast one person can think.
And no, I don't have good solution (other than to ensure you only hire the best people).
It's crazy to be mad at a programmer for a bug in their code found during a code review. Discuss it, learn from it, and not only does the code get fixed, everyone involved becomes a better programmer by some small amount.
The only time it's justifiable being mad is if something gets through code reviews and into production - and at that point it's not the programmer's fault, it's the fault of procedure which enabled buggy code to ship undetected. So you get mad at the system, review the failure and fix it.
This is written in law, and has been supported by court cases.
One incident like that is wrong, but could perhaps be explained by someone having a really bad day. Recognition, apology, and no further incidents would help.
But continued incidents? The company is leaving themselves open to lawsuits. ("Constructive dismissal" and employment tribunal in the UK.) I'm pretty sure that toxic work environment leading to poor health is something that has been through US courts.
I mention this because sometimes the only way you get through to PHBs is to talk about costs and risks, and not "don't let employees be dicks to other employees".
I'm not agreeing in any way with the manager in this situation; public humiliation of employees by managers is both morally cowardly (bullying someone from a position of power) and ineffective over the long run (in my opinion). But still, stress happens in most jobs. Often times it is caused by a combination of home and work factors. It's ridiculous to make "preventing stress" a legal duty of employers, because that's not wholly within an employers control. Example: Faulty machine used to serve customers blows up at work at now you have a lot of angry customers. Stress ensues.
Employers are expected to have procedures in place to deal with things like sexual harassment. This is similar, they're expected to have procedures in place to deal with bullying.
I agree that I might have made it sound stronger than it is. In real life it's pretty reasonable.
Making sure employees are happy and safe in their work is good business.
What will you do differently next time?
Would you call this behaviour out to your other manager or directly to the perpetrator?
If you want to avoid it happening again you should speak up. Unless you don't mind the abuse?
I think there's a lesson to be taken here. Not for managers (clearly good management would criticize privately) but for the employee. Learn to take a yell. It's not good style but it's widely common, people above you scream at you when you screw up. Learn not to take it personal, and not to let such incidents affect your passion for your work. The yelling is bad form, but it's not direct criticism at you. In large entreprises, it's the result of a chain of screaming starting at the top. In startups it's the result of the nerve-wrecking stress, founders go through.
'Constructive criticism' is an advice we give would-be managers, but it's a luxury starting employees rarely get. You're lucky if you meet one such boss in your career. Learn to take criticism, the bad kind, leaving out the humiliation. I found the best way to cut a yelling short is by answering loudly: "You're right I screwed up, I'm sorry. At least now I learned it, it won't happen again". After getting yelled at like this a few times, you'll realize it's really not against you, and such an answer would calm down your boss quickly; make sure not to make that mistake again, because then you'd really deserve a humiliation ;). This is easier said (written?) than done, but it's a natural part of one's career. I take it as a mental strength test.
Also, you won't be the junior on the team forever. One day you'll be responsible for an intern screwing up. Remember that moment and don't be too harsh.
Saying something that weird will just make it seem like you don't care or you're weird.
The fact you say you 'find it best' suggests you get shouted at a lot or you are making this up. Either way, you shouldn't be dispensing this kind of nonsense advice to other people who may well follow it.
You need to grow up.
> mistake, the initialization of variable $user (arrrgh!!).
> The website crashed on all the signed-in users.
I'm trying to imagine a professional, well run software shop that would actually hold you responsible for this. I can not. It seems to me that for this to have happened, many things must have gone wrong, or many professional practices must have been completely missing:
1.) there were no code reviews
2.) there were no unit tests
3.) there were no functional tests
4.) no one noticed any problems on the development site
5.) there was no QA person, or the whole QA team somehow failed to test this
6.) there were no 3rd party testing services that might have caught this (like Airbrake), nor any in house error logging services (errbit)
I could go on. I'm trying to imagine how a programmer comments out the $user variable and that change makes it all the way to production without anyone noticing. I think a lot of things have to wrong, all through the organization, before that becomes possible.
I read your story and I have 2 quick thoughts:
1.) I have made many worse mistakes (thought I was changing database password for dev, in the config file, but actually changed it for production)
2.) None of my worst mistakes ever made it to production, because the company had some process that caught them before such a change ever got pushed to production.
No programmer can avoid mistakes. That simply isn't possible. To insist that a programmer always write perfect code would be like insisting that an NBA basketball player make 100% of his 3 point shots: the world would be a very different place if it was possible to insist on perfection.
A well run organization has multiple checks that ensure mistakes made in development don't make it to production. Any organization that puts 100% responsibility on one programmer is taking a 100% certain risk that eventually some terrible mistake will make it to production.
Some organizations put more responsibility on individual programmers and some organizations put less. That is fine. A range of strategies can be defended. But if an organization wanted to shift most of the responsibility onto a single programmer, then they would also have to give that programmer broad latitude regarding time, so that the programmer can implement whatever they feel is necessary to ensure the robustness of the code (for instance, unit tests, functional tests, setting up automated uptime checks, etc). I'm guessing, from what few details are written above, that the above commenter both had responsibility for the code but was also under pressure to move quickly and shove stuff out the door. Under such circumstances, management needs to take 100% responsibility if something goes wrong.
Now I will qualify everything I said above with an anecdote: In 2005, when working at monkeyclaus.org, we had a little startup where I was the only programmer and we would push my changes straight to the "live" site. But we hadn't really launched yet and the few dozen users we had were just friends of ours, so the "live" site was really a "dev" site.
I had extensive experience with bullies in school and let me tell you being submissive or showing fear of any kind only brings out the worst in them. I know you can't throw the boss against the wall (which would get a school bully of your back) but at least don't make it worse.
And no, I hope you will not stay long enough in a place like that. There are better jobs elsewhere. Shoveling shit isn't as bad as that.
Of course if it was a one time thing and the manager apologized (in public) that is another thing.
The people on that page that are saying the abuse as well deserved are part of the problem.
Sure, it's not good code, and causes problems in production. It's certainly not the right way to do this -- but constructive criticism, gentle corrections, and rewards/acknowledgements of successes when they occur are far more effective in the long run than this public tirade bullshit. AFAIC, the PM that humiliates an employee in public for any reason is (a) immature, (b) short-sighted, (c) unprofessional, (d) a poor choice for a PM, and likely (e) insecure and feels the need to strut his/her intellectual "superiority" in front of others lest their authority/superiority be called into question.
I also would have quit on the spot -- life is far, far too short to deal with that kind of crap, and there are other work environments in our field where one can do what one enjoys and where it's okay to be a fucking human being instead of being viewed as merely a code generation resource that can be kicked around when it doesn't "behave."
The proper response to that kind of public humiliation is "Okay, you're right, it was a pretty stupid thing to do. But not as stupid as abusing your employees and creating an environment where the primary motivators are grounded in FUD. I'll collect my things from my desk because...how to communicate this part adequately...oh yeah: fuck you."
"This is retarded! There's no delay in the while loop. How many times does the client have to connect to the DB per second? Thousands! I can't believe this implementation is so fucking stupid!"
In this case we try to refer to the code directly, taking our reference to the person.
Wow, was it that hard to keep it down a little? see:
"Dude there's no delay in your while loop. How many times do you think the client can connect to the DB per second? Thousands! go fix that"
See? is not sugar-coating it, simply not being a gigantic asshole about it.
Is this a source of concern for the DB? If it is, you might want to consider limiting connections on one side or the other at a deeper level. Self-inflicted DoS bugs during development aren't fun, but actual DoS attacks in production are even less fun. If there's a potential way to bring your DB to its knees and you get popular enough for trolls (let alone actual crackers) to take notice (and if you're writing video games that presumably have high score boards or something similar this isn't that unlikely) expect people to find it.
It's good to get yelled at some number of times throughout your life to help you grow a thicker skin, but I've never been yelled at in the work environment. If it occurred I'd be strongly motivated to quit like others here. Stating matter-of-factly "That was stupid" is one thing, joking and exaggerating stupidity of yourself or others is another (and is dependent on implicit understanding of such and also requires a certain culture of the group), but when it gets to a manager actually screaming at you about a possibility of something bad happening then that's the line, at least for me. If I wanted to get screamed at, I'd join the military.
This is an interesting statement in the article and I think it is worth bringing up. It contrasts significantly to the other article I just read that said that "public shaming", which is just another word for public humiliation, is a desirable practice needed to stem the existential threat to engineering of "brogrammers".
http://www.cnn.com/2012/05/10/opinion/trapani-brogrammer-cul...
> Sometimes the road to enlightenment is paved with public shaming.
If you think public humility is motivating it probably is in the short term. But its the most motivating for getting that resume spruced up again.
I too have been the subject of manager outbursts like this. Only do it if you're deliberately trying to get rid of the person, and if you're doing that, be aware of the precedent you're setting. There's too many things to know about programming for any one person to be expert in everything, and never make a WTF mistake.