A junior fat fingers a command line and accidentally deletes prod. Do you
a) Immediately fire the junior, yell a bunch and send company wide messages that anyone else making the same mistake will face the same consequences
b) Do a retro, figure out process changes that can avoid the same mistake happening again and thank the junior for discovering a flaw in our processes that leave room for improvement?
>A junior fat fingers a command line and accidentally deletes prod. Do you
A) Delete prod yourself because it was obviously your design flaw for creating a production server.
B) Teach juniors that deleting prod destroys the company and that to keep the company alive we need to limit anyone to deleting prod more than two times at the company. We don't want to punish people who know how not to delete prod from working on prod.
C) Teach juniors that deleting prod destroys the company and that deleting prod means their instant access to prod is now forfeit for a set amount of time and needs to be reviewed.
D) Ramble on about how everything that goes wrong with a persons actions is a good thing and all the negatives are actually positives.
Would you like a 50/50?
Neither of your solutions are good. You can't "change a process" and have prod be both worked on and undeletable. Prods have existed for a long time without constantly being deleted everywhere, they also need to be accessed. This isn't a situation where you're magically limited from deleting X or Y or Z but not XYZ.
>and thank the junior for discovering a flaw in our processes that leave room for improvement?
This is the most unhinged part of your comment and made me laugh. Reward the poop on the floor with a treat! It's clearly my fault for buying carpet!
I find this post super confusing, like I can’t tell if it’s satire or just super strawmanning.
The problem clearly isn’t that “you can delete prod” — the problem is that you can “fat finger a command line and accidentally delete prod”.
You can absolutely make it harder to delete prod—since this is something few people are doing regularly—by requiring some kind of confirmation. That’s the process change being discussed, and is the smart response.
a) Immediately fire the junior, yell a bunch and send company wide messages that anyone else making the same mistake will face the same consequences
b) Do a retro, figure out process changes that can avoid the same mistake happening again and thank the junior for discovering a flaw in our processes that leave room for improvement?