Whenever I read stories like "junior employee made a million-dollar mistake", I wonder if it's 100% their fault. On the one hand, ofc it is because they need to take ownership of their actions. But on the other hand, if you're a company generating millions of dollars, and you don't have backups and you give your junior dev this level of access with no guardrails, I guess your management should also take part of the blame. It's as if someone sent a junior salesman with no oversight to a meeting with the most important company's client worth $1M. It's just not a good idea.
> Whenever I read stories like "junior employee made a million-dollar mistake," I wonder if it's 100% their fault. It, obviously, isn't. > The CEO leaned across the table, got in my face, and said, "this, is a monumental fuck up. You're gonna cost us millions in revenue". People sometimes intentionally turn a blind eye to their bad risk management. > I found myself on the phone to Rackspace, leaning on a desk for support, listening to their engineer patiently explain that backups for this MySQL instance had been cancelled over 2 months ago. Ah. A simple and basically free backup would have probably prevented this from happening. People somehow lie to themselves about risks. Either this, or they turn a blind eye. If you have a million-dollar business but a single person can cause a million dollars of damage with a single click, you're just awful at managing risk, and maybe you don't deserve to lead/own that company.