When I first started in IT I remember being told “don’t worry too much, at least you won’t kill anyone”.

At the time that was mainly true, IT was just a bolt on thing that did some bonus stuff, little of it truly business critical. Today IT underpins the healthcare you receive, the airports, retailers, supply chains, motorway safety and just about every aspect of your life now depends on the reliability and resilience of IT. The future is even further integrated and so it is essential we start to get a grip on the repeated failures that happen and work on a principle of prevention rather than cure, alongside an automated detect and fix mentality. Some of this will help IT become brilliant.

This, I guess, is a bit of a personal contribution to /r/talesfromtectsupport, in many times admitting my own failures but giving you learning from them. Do not do what I did back then, is a part of my message. Learn from my failure, be better than I was, quicker and let’s collectively make this industry great! I have also collated tales from my colleagues past and present, much of this you couldn't make up!

In publishing this I have had a few interesting comments:

    “These stories don’t matter, IT moves on too quick to bother learning”

    “My IT infrastructure is unique, I can’t learn from someone else’s mistakes”

    “I don’t have time to look at failures, it’s old infrastructure, we are moving to the cloud”

I hear the response but some of the failures that happen are human driven by simple behaviours that could be prevented had the person heard some of the stories. Others are about real world problems giving rise to learning a basic principle to problem solving. Both offer opportunities to learn from a potentially humorous event when you look at it from the outside, or in retrospect. That is why I am writing this, to help you not fail at IT. Regardless of your infrastructure.

The articles are vaguely in some sort of chronological order (according to my brain) so the technology will change and become more modern as you progress through the stories - that doesn’t mean there is not a valid lesson in an older story.

Enjoy our collective failures, we did, albeit often under some form of duress at the time!