Junior developer fired because he dropped production database

https://twitter.com/ryanlpeterman/status/1722282942389690793

by michaelbrooks • 3 years ago

2 4 3 years ago

devjab• 3 years ago

I once deleted all the virtual phone numbers in the municipality where I was working. It wasn’t entirely my fault as I was basically working with some Cisco tech that nobody knew how worked doing pretty much exactly what our IT operations department had requested, but it was still me who did it. I went to tell the CTO feeling more than a little afraid. I didn’t coat it in the “it wasn’t my fault” part that I did here, because I didn’t really think it mattered, and it turned out that it didn’t. He basically told me that while he wasn’t happy that it had happened, he was happy my first reaction was to come running and admit my mistake so that it could be fixed, and that everyone makes mistakes but it’s the ones who hide it that are dangerous.

This is something I’ve taken with my in my career myself, and in my experience it fosters a much healthier culture than firing someone for dropping a database they frankly should not have had the rights to drop in the first place. Like… what organisation in all seriousness gives a junior developer the access rights to drop a production database on their first day? And then after this even has the audacity to blame the junior dev? Seriously…

throw932490• 3 years ago

what organisation in all seriousness gives a junior developer the access rights to drop a production database

It is pretty normal. Someone with university education, should know how to use a SQL client! I personally would fire such person as well. Carelessly copy&paste and execute code from some website is a huge redflag! Getting rid of such person on their trial period is very cheap....

Also many services are not mission critical. DB drop could mean short downtime, and restoration from backup (or Kafka stream), and with little loss revenue.

Ekaros• 3 years ago

I'm overly careful person in these sort of cases.

But I expect people to take lot of care and thought when doing something in production like Database. And some even in shared development/pre-prod one. If you know how to replicate whole thing, go wild you are only wasting some time.

jjgreen• 3 years ago

This is new twitter post about an old story https://old.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/6ez8ag/a...

Junior developer fired because he dropped production database

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