Someone fisrt day as a developer

Post Reply
User avatar
Pigeon
Posts: 18055
Joined: Thu Mar 31, 2011 3:00 pm

Someone fisrt day as a developer

Post by Pigeon » Sat Jun 03, 2017 7:15 pm

Check out this man's story. I am amazed at the people who get to be at the top of so many companies.

https://np.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestio ... tabase_on/

User avatar
Royal
Posts: 10562
Joined: Mon Apr 11, 2011 5:55 pm

Re: Someone fisrt day as a developer

Post by Royal » Tue Jun 06, 2017 8:01 pm

Good advice in the discussion.

Hi, guy here who accidentally nuked GitLab.com's database earlier this year. Fortunately we did have a backup, though it was 6 hours old at that point.

This is not your fault. Yes, you did use the wrong credentials and ended up removing the database but there are so many red flags from the company side of things such as:

Sharing production credentials in an onboarding document
Apparently having a super user in said onboarding document, instead of a read-only user (you really don't need write access to clone a DB)
Setting up development environments based directly on the production database, instead of using a backup for this (removing the need for the above)
CTO being an ass. He should know everybody makes mistakes, especially juniors. Instead of making sure you never make the mistake again he decides to throw you out
The tools used in the process make no attempt to check if they're operating on the right thing
Nobody apparently sat down with you on your first day to guide you through the process (or at least offer feedback), instead they threw you into the depths of hell
Their backups aren't working, meaning they weren't tested (same problem we ran into with GitLab, at least that's working now)

Legal wise I don't think you have that much to worry about, but I'm not a lawyer. If you have the money for it I'd contact a lawyer to go through your contract just in case it mentions something about this, but otherwise I'd just wait it out. I doubt a case like this would stand a chance in court, if it ever gets there.

My advice is:

Document whatever happened somewhere
Document any response they send you (e.g. export the Emails somewhere)
If they threaten you, hire a lawyer or find some free advice line (we have these in The Netherlands for basic advice, but this may differ from country to country)
Don't blame yourself, this could have happened to anybody; you were just the first one
Don't pay any damage fees they might demand unless your employment contract states you are required to do so


Post Reply