I generally avoid Reddit, I figure I have enough things in my life sucking my time. But from time to time one link comes across my screen that I find interesting. This is one of them.

The user accidentally deleted a production database. Now, I think we can all agree that deleting a database in production is a “bad thing”. But, whose fault is this really?

Yes, one could argue the employee should have been more careful, but, let’s backup.

The respondents in the thread raise several good points.

• Why were the values in the documentation ones that pointed to a LIVE, production database? Why not point to a dev copy or even better yet, one that doesn’t really exist. They expect the person to update/change the parameters anyway, so worst case if they put in the fake ones in is, nothing happens.
• Why didn’t Production have backups? This is a completely separate question, but a very important one!
• Why fire him? As many pointed out, he had just learned a VERY valuable lesson, and taught the company a very valuable lesson too!

I’ll admit, I’d something similar in my career at one of my employers. Except I wasn’t an intern, I was the Director of IT, and my goal in fact WAS to do something on the live database. The mistake I made was a minor one in execution (reversed the direction of an arrow on the GUI before hitting the Execute button) but disastrous in terms of impact. And of course there wasn’t a recent enough backup.

I wasn’t fired for that.  I did develop and enforce our change control documents after that and always ensured, as much as possible that we had adequate backups. (Later in a my career, a larger, bigger muckup did get me… “given the opportunities to apply my skills elsewhere”, but there were other factors involved and I arguably wasn’t fired JUST for the initial issue.)

As the Director of IT, I made a point of telling my employees that story. And I explained to them, that I expected them to make mistakes. If they didn’t they probably weren’t trying hard enough. But I told them the two things that I wouldn’t accept would be lying about a mistake (trying to cover it up, or blame others, etc) and repeatedly making the same mistake.

I wrote in an earlier post that mistakes were avoidable. But as I pointed out, it’s actually more complex than that. Some mistakes are avoidable. Or, at least they can be managed. For example, it is unfortunately likely that at some point, someone, somewhere, will munge production data.  Perhaps they won’t delete it all, or perhaps they’ll do a make a White Ford Taurus type mistake, but it will happen.  So you have safeguards in place. First, limit the number of people in a position to make such a mistake. Second, have adequate backups. There’s probably other steps you can do to reduce the chance of error and mitigate it when it does eventually happen. Work on those.

But don’t fire the person who just learned a valuable lesson. They’re the one that is least likely to make that mistake again.  Me, I’d probably fire the CTO for not having backups and for having production values in documentation like that AND for firing the new guy.