"Ok class, for the rest of the semester, we're going to use the C89 standard".
I forgot the return 0; at the end of my main function and lost points on a test. Decided to be a point slut to ensure an A in the class and argued that it's allowed in the C99 standard. The professor sighed and gave me back my points, but next class specified the exact standard he was grading by.
I have to admit it sounds stupid to deduct points for that anyway, a test should measure your ability to reason, not your ability to remember trivial formalities.
Unfortunately C needs you to remember a lot of formalities and best practices to keep things from blowing up in your face. So I think it makes sense in this case.
What do you think is going to happen if you hire a brand new person out of college, give them no directions, mentorship, processes, or procedures, and literally say "don't ask me, I pay you to figure it out"?
I can work in a "ask for forgiveness, not permission - move fast and break things" culture. But then people shouldn't be getting mad when shit breaks.
They were already broken, I just gave the ok to throw them out. They had been sitting there for more than half my lifetime, no one was doing anything with them, near as anyone could tell I was now the "owner" of them, I wasn't going to waste my time investigating 15 year old problems. So I said, "sure, make them disappear".
Someone in Finance took issue with that, something about making the $15 million value of those parts appear on the books correctly. Nice to get my first high-dollar mistake out of the way early!
As a second-year uni student I applied for a tutoring job at the university. I was still underage by a few weeks when the semester started, which caused them a bit of extra bureaucratic hassle when I was supposed to sign the contract.
After that, they've added a question "are you going to be at least 18 when starting the position" to the application form :D
Where I work in software development, we were about to undertake writing a pretty large application from scratch. Mostly, the company was a Java plus Spring shop with a few exceptions. One team wrote almost exclusively Python, for instance. But as far as I knew, there wasn't any specific policy requiring the use of any particular language.
So as a team, we pushed to write our new project in Python. It was originally my idea, but my team got on board with it pretty quickly. Plus there was precedent for Python projects and Python was definitely appropriate for our use case.
The managers took it up the chain. The chain hemmed and hawed for months, but eventually made a more official policy that we had to use Java (and Spring).