Developer Accidentally Deletes Production Database On Their First Day On The Job (qz.com)

An anonymous reader quotes Quartz: "How screwed am I?" asked a recent user on Reddit, before sharing a mortifying story. On the first day as a junior software developer at a first salaried job out of college, his or her copy-and-paste error inadvertently erased all data from the company's production database. Posting under the heartbreaking handle cscareerthrowaway567, the user wrote, "The CTO told me to leave and never come back. He also informed me that apparently legal would need to get involved due to severity of the data loss. I basically offered and pleaded to let me help in someway to redeem my self and i was told that I 'completely fucked everything up.'"
The company's backups weren't working, according to the post, so the company is in big trouble now. Though Qz adds that "the court of public opinion is on the new guy's side. In a poll on the tech site the Register, less than 1% of 5,400 respondents thought the new developer should be fired. Forty-five percent thought the CTO should go."

Comments

We need to have medals to give out.

[clovis]

I say if he succeeded in putting that company out of business, then he should get a medal for sacrificing himself to destroy the company.

My belief is when he saw on his first day, the badly written docs they handed him, with a printed (!) account/password having RW access, he instinctively threw himself on that grenade by destroying their production database. Only the most cowardly IT worker would have done otherwise.

Thank you, selfless IT worker from saving us from the horror of whatever product they were trying to produce.

Re:Why Was He Mucking With It In The First Place?

[Kjella]

Having production databases that can be reached from developers workstations is always a bad idea.

Welcome to DevOps ;)

Re:Why Was He Mucking With It In The First Place?

[Shadyman]

Having production databases that can be reached from developers workstations is always a bad idea. They were lucky, in a way, that the developer deleted the data and didn't just alter it slightly.

You'd also have to pray they did not alter it any further.

Re: How the fuck

[Anne Thwacks]

He was a developer not a systems administrator. There is NO reason why he should even be allowed access to production data, let alone live production data.

Hell, even on a one man business, development should not be done on the same machine as production activities.

Even my home machines have off-site table backups - and yes I have tested recovery works - cross platform - on different hardware and OS.

if your data is worth money, you should be prepared to spend money to protect it. If its not worth anything, then just delete it yourself and save the disk space.

Disclaimer: I do not have an MBA.