Comment by thaumaturgy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thaumaturgy | Hacker News Reader

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Sure, but it doesn't take a development team two to three days to recover "conceptually lost" data (as according to the post).

If you're about to touch the production database in a way that could potentially end catastrophically, and there aren't backups, you really should stop and consider the meaning of life before proceeding. Preferably, you decide that backups are the meaning of life, and even if it's an imperfect backup, you decide to manually export the table(s) you're working on. Or something.

He didn't do that. It's a rookie mistake. It cost the company two to three days of development team time to recover from it.

For a community that seems to pride itself on being the best of the bunch at this stuff, I am super surprised that the response here wasn't, "You touched prod without a backup first?! Are you daft?", but was instead, "Miso is a bad company, you need to lawyer up and get what they owe you."

Or, to put it another way: if there were any justice at all, this story would follow rremoncake around for just as long as it follows Miso around.

The flaw in this argument is that it assumes rremoncake was solely responsible for the decision to not back up prod. I think that responsibility falls on the CTO/CEO, and so yeah, Miso is a bad company for that, and that whole incident should have no relevance to the bonus debacle.

> It's a rookie mistake.

It's a mistake I've seen people with 20 years of experience make. If you haven't done it already, you will eventually. When that day comes, I hope, but don't expect, you'll remember to apologize to this guy.

> For a community that seems to pride itself on being the best of the bunch at this stuff

How you get from "Hacker News" to "infallible operations engineers" is beyond me. Operations is a rare skill to begin with, and even those who are best at it will make these mistakes.

Of course it's a mistake I've made.

The difference between me and this guy is that I wouldn't've turned around and asked the company for a bunch of money afterward.

And what, exactly, do you think I owe him an apology for?

Insulting him and telling him he shouldn't ask for money he is clearly owed because of a mistake we've all made. Actually, that second part is an insult, too. So, really, just being incredibly insulting.

That you wouldn't ask for the money is irrelevant. We're not required by any law, moral, or ethic to go through life as a doormat. At this point, money has been stolen from him, just as if they'd taken it from his bank account. He is owed that money, and entitled to ask for it without you attacking him for it.

Well, now I think you owe me an apology for telling me that I'm being insulting. Not that I expect to get one.

Whatever. This thread has been an idiotic waste of time. I do think I'll be saving it for future reference though.

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