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

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


“Two types of people in operation: who has already broken production, who is just about to do it.” A

post published 10 days ago gathered more than 23 thousand positive votes on Reddit and went to other specialized resources like The New Stack . The essence of the story is this:

Today was my first day at work as a Junior Software Developer and my first post-university position, which is not an internship. Unfortunately, I messed up a lot.

I was given a document with information on how to set up a local environment for development. Instructions include running a small script to create a personal copy of the database with test data. After running a certain command, I had to copy the URL / password / user of the database from its output and configure the dev environment, indicating 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 don’t know why they are documented in the instructions for setting up the dev environment). Further, as I understand it, the tests added fake data and cleared the existing ones, that is, between the test runs, all data from the database in production was deleted. Honestly, I had no idea what I did, and to find out / realize it, it took some of my colleagues not even half an hour.

When it began to become clear what really happened, the technical director told me to leave work and not return again. He also said that because of the importance of the lost data, lawyers will be involved in the case. I asked and begged to let me somehow help rehabilitate, but the answer was that I was "completely all about *** l."

Further discussion of Slack employees showed that backups for this database were not restored, and "the entire development team was in panic mode."


“Schrödinger's backup: the status of any backup remains unknown until they try to restore it.”

Summing up the story, the developer is interested in an online audience about ideas on how he can remotely help in this situation and whether he should expect any legal consequences as a result deed.

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

PS Reddit comments point toa similar story at Amazon in 2012, and, of course, a very recent case with GitLab .

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

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