Tonight, after a failure I had migrating a database, I was reminded of an incident that occurred in one of my past jobs. I had recently awarded a new job with about 33% more pay. It was really nice to be able to receive a better salary and I hoped that the work environment would have been better.
Anyways, so one day I come to work and you know people talk. Some of it true, some of it not so true. Anyways I thought I was okay with the administrative staff at the time and one of them decided to share that someone high up in management mentioned that they weren't sure if I knew what I was doing.
It really got me but I think I understood why. I had received higher level jobs at a young age and you must understand that when you're not aged, it's really difficult to get older people to respect you as an experienced person - they can respect you for being a good person but not necessarily experienced.
The thing about IT is that people think that everything is understood. I suppose now that I think about it, I always think that medical science knows everything related to health - but if we think about it - I guess that isn't really true right? Same goes with the most experienced IT personnel out there.
You'll find a lot of professionals that stick to best practices but I realize that best practices is supposed to be for doing something properly yet it also gives the impression to the person hiring you that you know what you are doing. But sometimes, there's no best practice for venturing into a new territory. So you just have to try and hope for success or you try and fail and try and fail unto you find where the failure is coming from - then you get wisdom and then you can make a best practice based on success or experience.
Today was a day like that. Working with a 2TB database is far different from a small wordpress website like this one. In fact, the database today was 2.1 TB database and the VM disk was exactly 2.0 TB. There's a whole 100 G of data that just couldn't fit. This sounds like a foolish thing but I was so focused on trying to get that db unto the test server, I made the assumption that postgres was reporting the correct size - it probably was EXCEPT there were a few additional databases in there that I didn't cater for. So during the copy of the actual database files - it ended up being 2.1 TB.
It absolutely sucks to miss something so small yet important. It absolutely sucks when you're afraid of losing the confidence of your boss and colleagues when you make a mistake. And I know it's not the end of the world in this case, but I serious hate failing at things.