Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by bzzzt 1951 days ago
Years ago, the company I worked at had a very big production issue which resulted in a customer's database being deleted. Of course, the customer was furious and called the CEO asking for the person responsible to be fired.

Calmly, our CEO said: 'No. If there's anyone in this company who will never make that mistake again it's him.'
1 comments
treis 1951 days ago
I've seen this sort of Zen of CEO type story a lot but it doesn't match up with reality. Someone that deletes a production DB by being careless or reckless is likely to do something similar again. Perhaps not in the exact same way, but there's infinite ways to break things. Those that stumble upon one are likely to stumble upon another.
link
bzzzt 1948 days ago
In that case everyone making 1 mistake is 'out'. Seems "cancel culture" is leaking into ops...

I was in the room when the CEO told that (one of the nice things about small companies) and have had contact with the person responsible for a few years until he got another job. True story ;)

There were changes though: the 'two pair of eyes' principle was enforced a lot stricter from then on.

link