Junior, who on the first day of work deleted the database from production

Reddit and other foreign resources literally conquered the story of a junior developer who, having come to his first job, deleted the production database on the first day.


"Two types of people in operation: who already broke production, who else is just going to do it"

Published 10 days ago, a note gathered more than 23,000 positive votes on Reddit and sold out on other specialized resources like The New Stack . The essence of the story is:
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Today was my first day at work as a junior software developer (Junior Software Developer) and my first position after university, which is not an internship. Sorry, I screwed it up badly.

I was given a document with information on how to set up a local development environment. Instructions include running a small script to create a personal copy of the database with test data. After launching a certain command, I had to copy the URL / password / user of the database from its output and configure the dev-environment, specifying this database there. Unfortunately, instead of copying the data of the necessary command, for some reason I used the values ​​from the document itself.

Unfortunately, it turned out that the values ​​indicated there are from the database in production (I do not know why they are documented in the instructions for setting up the dev environment). Further, as I understand it, the tests added false data and cleared the existing ones, that is, between test launches, all data from the database in production was deleted. Honestly, I didn’t have an idea what I did, but it took even half an hour for someone from my colleagues to find out / realize it.

When it began to clear up what actually happened, the technical director told me to leave work and never to return. He also said that due to the importance of the lost data, lawyers will be involved in the case. I asked and begged to allow me to somehow help rehabilitate, but the answer to me was that I was “completely all about *** l.”

Further discussion of the company's employees at Slack showed that backups for this database were not restored, and “the entire development team was in a panic mode.”


“Schrödinger's backup: the state of any backup remains unknown until it has been tried to be restored”

Summing up his story, the developer is interested in the Internet audience about the ideas of how he can remotely help in this situation and whether he should expect any legal consequences as a result of what he has done.

A survey among 13+ thousand users conducted at The Register showed that only 1% of people consider the junior developer to be correctly dismissed, but 47.5% of Internet users wanted to dismiss CTO. What do you think?

PS In the comments, Reddit points to a similar story in Amazon that happened in 2012, and, of course, another very fresh case with GitLab .

PPS The purpose of this publication is to recall obvious things:

1. Pay due attention to building important company internal processes and documenting.
2. Do not forget about backups (and recovery from them).
3. Even in stressful situations, maintain adequacy in relation to people.