Career Limiting Moves

Another weekend and another blog post. For those who read these, thank you, and for those that don't, it's all good — I've worked out that this is much cheaper than therapy.

So, a slight change of pace for this post: Career Limiting Moves and how to make them.

A week or so ago I was talking to someone who had recently joined the workforce and within their first week made a bit of a mistake, nothing drastic or harmful — it's not like they worked for CrowdStrike. Anyway, after comforting them that it wasn't as big a deal as they'd made it out to be in their head, and that in a couple of weeks it would be a long-forgotten memory, I found myself reliving some of my grander mistakes, or Career Limiting Moves, as they were affectionately known.

This got me thinking that as an alternative to the steady stream of LinkedIn posts of "AI is going to save you / AI is going to kill you" or "CGT is going to save you / CGT is going to kill you," reliving our greatest stuff-ups for other generations might be a bit of fun, in that weird, sadistic interpretation of fun.

So obviously I have to go first, and there are two that immediately jump to mind: one from the very early part of my career and one that wasn't all that long ago.

Let's start with the earlier one.

Career Limiting Move Number 1

It was 1994. Ace of Base was dominating the airwaves, everyone was on Team Simba, and Pulp Fiction had just introduced the world to Samuel L. Jackson's most memorable Bible passage.

I was working for a small training company that later became ATI Mirage as a trainer, and amongst the standard off-the-shelf product training courses, we had a contract with a large WA Oil and Gas company to provide training on their mainframe system. It was a beast of a system and they had two training venues, one in Perth and one in Karratha. The system was used for finance and reporting but mainly consisted of moving files around. Part of the training included demonstrating how you could hot-swap one of the backup hard drives while it was running — note, this was the training system, not production.

The most important part of 1994 for me, however, was November, when I married the love of my life (33 years — I still don't know how she does it). So I got married in November, had some time off for the honeymoon, came back for a couple of weeks before the Christmas break, and then in late January found myself back at the customer's Perth training centre to run the course.

The course was going well right up until I went to demonstrate the hot-swap feature, and then bang. Well, not really a bang, more of a crack, a fizz, and a bit of smoke. After a few moments of confusion, realisation slowly crept in: my right hand now had a highly conductive little gold ring on it, which had caused a spark that blew the CPU.

I contacted the liaison person for the company to let them know what had happened and ask what I needed to do. They simply asked, "What's the limit of your company's liability insurance?" — which, obviously, made my stomach sink. Not knowing the answer, I had to contact the owner of Mirage, explain what had happened, and let him know who we needed to get in touch with to sort things out.

Needless to say, as a 25-year-old, I was very nervous walking back into the Mirage office to face my boss and the owner. Luckily, they were far more understanding than I'd expected, and my boss was far more interested in examining the blown CPU under a microscope than he was in berating me for my foolishness.

Career Limiting Move Number 2

This one wasn't so long ago, but it was pre-COVID, so it feels like a lifetime ago.

It was 2018. I was the IT Manager for Standardised Work, and we were in what I liked to think of as our golden era (no disrespect to the people still working on Standardised Work today). The IT and BOS teams were heavily integrated thanks to James Garwood's leadership, we had plenty of wins on the board, and a massive value proposition target to aim for.

The team had grown to the point where we'd adopted a version of Scaled Agile and ran quarterly planning days — again, being pre-COVID, these were two-day in-person events (Thursday and Friday), with the mobile team flying in from China and members of the BOS Implementation teams flying in from all over the world. In two days we were able to confirm targets and agree on commitments to plans.

It was around our fourth planning day cycle, and as something a little different I had invited Brian Elloy from the innovation team to present on his team's 100x Innovation Strategy. It was a brilliant piece of work, tying BHP's Exploration to Port lifecycle, underpinned by business processes, core systems, and network infrastructure to provide a four-layer end-to-end picture, outlining where system, process, and equipment automation could work in synergy to lift productivity. At the end of the presentation, Brian and Mike promised to send me an electronic copy of the poster to share with the team, which they did.

On the Monday, the trains were delayed and instead of waiting around and arriving late, I decided to head home and work from there. Now, again, this is pre-COVID — no dedicated home office with multiple screens, just a laptop strategically balanced on my lap in one of the spare rooms. I found the file Brian had sent, forwarded it on to the workshop participants, and got on with the work of capturing everything planned during the previous week's sessions.

Around mid-morning, I received a strange and cryptic email from a very irate manager in BHP's Rail department, demanding to know who had given me the right to do what I'd done.

After a bit of confusion and reading back through the message thread, a cold, sinking feeling set in. I hadn't forwarded the innovation poster to my team and planning day participants. Somehow, I had sent it to a distribution list for the entirety of Port and Rail.

Now, at around this point — and again pre-COVID — I discovered that you cannot retract an email using Microsoft Outlook Web Access, as that feature only works in the desktop application, which I couldn't access from home. Not that it would have helped much; attempting to retract an email of that kind would have just made it more interesting for people to go and find.

Shortly after, I received a phone call from one of the IT VPs. They'd seen the poster displayed in one of the office kitchens and wanted to know if I could help track down who had put them up, as they were concerned that anyone from site who saw the automation examples might interpret them as a signal of coming layoffs.

I told them I had good news and bad news. The good news: I knew exactly who was responsible for the posters. The bad news: I'd just sent a PDF of the same poster to everyone in Port and Rail and had already received a rather pointed reply from an understandably annoyed Rail manager.

Throughout the day I spoke with the VP, received updates and guidance, and fielded calls and emails from what felt like everyone in the IT hierarchy, all of them reassuring me that mistakes happen and that I had their full support. I started to feel a little like the coach of a struggling football team, where the players, manager, and board all publicly back the coach right up until the moment they don't.

Luckily for me, that's not how it played out. Outside of an IR review of my computer and communications to confirm it was a genuine mistake, a bit of good-natured ribbing from teammates, and some friendly advice to avoid Port Hedland for a while, the whole thing was soon forgotten and life went on.

And look, I could wrap this up with a neat reflection on how fortunate I was to have leaders who prioritised resolution over blame, and I genuinely was. But what I'm more interested in is this: who else is ready to share their career limiting moves? Think you can top a fried mainframe and an accidental company-wide email? Let's hear it.