What's The Most Expensive Mistake You've Made At Work?

Not jumping from company to company has cost me a lot in both past and future earnings.

The most expensive mistake I made was not properly emphasizing and escalating how important it was to not simply migrate just one of my old kickstart files to automation and use it for everything and to retest the settings each time the OS, BIOS and hardware had changed. I said each role of server needed its own settings and to re-test them each time the OS or hardware changed. Nobody wanted to do this.

I had settings specific to CentOS5+Dell+BIOS versions that controlled CPU power settings. There was a specific need at time time for this. I did communicate this multiple times but I was shrugged off. CentOS 6 brought in a less old kernel that vastly improved intel power management and around the time CentOS 7 was being used the company had grown significantly and there was a team dedicated to doing analytics on power usage and cost. The old kernel settings that had never been updated were costing the company an extra $3 million in power usage per year.

Accepting management position instead of focusing on my technical skills. I ended up having some interesting experience but boy I would have been better off honing my tech skills instead.