Mr. deSitter, please understand IT professionals a little better.
If you are sitting in an airplane, push the button to start engine 1 and nothing happens do you sit and think before you push the next buttons? "Why did it do that? What will go wrong if I do X or Y or Z?" There is probably a procedure to follow. But IF (added) nothing will break if you sit there looking blank while you ponder the situation, check a few dials, and then proceed.
IT professionals are much like that. As a developer I am not strictly "IT person". But I often have what I just wrote do something completely wonkity. I'll sit and review what I did, what might have caused the error, and maybe even try to recreate it one or more times. (If it recreates easy it is easier to find.) But the first thing I do is sit there and exercise by brain instead of my brawn. It helps, before the next action, to have a half a notion what went wrong before making a total mess of things. (One of the REALLY critical questions is, "Was this the disk drive getting flakey?" If it is you want to get a backup before you mess with anything else. I am sure with the engine start scenario there are "co-symptoms" you look for and if they appear you try not to jump out the cockpit window and instead do your best to save the passengers then the plane then yourself from the engine that just caught fire. The disk drive is sort of the IT equivalent.
Think FIRST, then react. Otherwise you might turn something bad into a total disaster. (And for some operator errors on the keyboard all you can do is hit control-c, the command line stop the stupid program command, and pray. With the UNIX derived OSs if you accidentally misuse "rm -rf" you can clean off the entire hard disk if you don't stop it quickly. So the command issued is checked right away. Then you stare blankly looking at things and thinking. And of course that, too, involves thinking on what you did before you stop it. Sometimes stopping a command can do more damage than letting it complete.
Some people paraphrase this as "Don't just do something; sit there."
Edit - added back a word I'd been thinking and didn't type.
Last edited by JD-EE; 20th May 2011 at 16:47.