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Comment by newishuser | Hacker News Reader

You did them more good than harm.

1) Not having backups is an excuse-less monumental fuckup.

2) Giving anyone delete access to your production db, especially a junior dev through a GUI tool, is an excuse-less monumental fuckup.

Hopefully they rectified these two problems and are now a stronger company for it.

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I think it's a bit extreme to say he did more good than harm. He might have done some long-term good by having the company re-examine permissions and environments, but he probably did a lot of long-term harm by alienating current and future customers.

Better that it happened 2 months after backups were canceled than 6 months or later. If you're going to cancel your backups you're begging for disaster.

"But but but but...that item in the expense report is HUUUGE, and what revenue did we get out of having backups lately? Or ever? I say we drop it, nothing could possibly happen."

Some experiences are non-transferable. This identical conversation has taken place millions of times, but noooo: every penny-wise-pound-foolish CEO wants to experience the real thing, apparently.

There's an argument to be made that the company is doing harm to customers just by existing in such a precarious state. Anything that forces the technical leadership of the company to do the right thing or fail completely is actually better for customers in the long term.

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