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Exactly what you said. Rigor is truly the right word to use here. Cancelling your db backups is basically asking for a disaster. I'm not sure i have ever been at job that didnt require a db backup for some reason at some time.



To say nothing of running development code against a production database.

If there were only two junior folks, what were the senior folks doing?


This was my question. Usually the "junior" folks are shown how to do things by the senior engineers. The fact they threw this guy under the bus while letting the rest of the senior guys skate is appalling.

Part of your job as a senior developer is to ensure this very scenario doesn't happen, let alone to someone on your watch.


The junior dev was 22 at the time and fresh out of school.

I'm assuming the senior devs were 23 and had a year on the job. The principal devs were a ripe 24, otherwise known as old men. :-)


He and his coworkers might not have been "Senior" before and they still might not be fully senior, but they are MUCH closer now.

>Ding! >Gratz!


The author makes mention of using a UI to connect to their db. If i was in a position over there i can see myself writing a script to clear out the tables i wanted. This reduces errors, but not the risk.


And yet, the net result is the same; right-click, clear table, or ./clearTable.sh. Both are human actions, and both are fallible. What if some prankster edited clearTable.sh to do the users table instead of the raids table? What if he did it himself to test something?


Forget a prankster! What happens if the full RAID array fails that holds the database? No backups: dead company.


Heck when you put it that way, this guy actually did them a FAVOR. He ONLY wiped out the User table. The company was able to learn the value of backups, and they had enough data left to be able to partially recover it from the remaining tables, which is much better than the worst case scenario.


Do you think the company learned the value of backups, or do you think they learned to blame junior devs for fuckups? Sounds like they learned nothing, because no attempt was made to determine the root cause.


Arrow up, enter Or ctrl+r <something> enter Can be very dangerous if something other than your routine is in the bash history.


Exactly. It's not like nothing bad ever happened from the command line ;-)

rm * .doc




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