[rhtgrg]

> I specifically dislike the "Lessons" section, as it throws all the blame on github and doesn't mention the seemingly obvious advice: "make sure you're not on autopilot when taking potentially dangerous actions, on github or any website".

I don't know. Github employees themselves have made this mistake as outlined in the post, and they were easily able to recover from it, which probably lowered the priority on changing any UX.

Essentially, it's a complete non-issue depending on whether Github cares about you.

Would you like the police in your area to behave in this manner? I think not.

[input_sh]

I found GitHub's Senior Director of DevRel on Twitter saying this:

> Sadly we can't easily do that without triggering lots of issue. We tried with a couple of projects in the past and found it caused a bunch of bad things to happen.

https://twitter.com/martinwoodward/status/149333028949351629...

[jacobsenscott]

Idk about "easily", but I'm sure they were motivated. If you've ever tried to restore parts of a database in a piecemeal fashion, it is usually fairly labor intensive. But you would hope there are a few gh engineers who would be motivated to do so without manager approval in the dead of night because httpie is great.

[swiftcoder]

> But you would hope there are a few gh engineers who would be motivated to do so without manager approval in the dead of night because httpie is great

On the other hand, you should really, really, really hope that GitHub has internal guardrails to prevent their engineers making cowboy edits to the production databases without manager approval.

[jacobsenscott]

Haven't worked there, but I assume one engineer just needs one other engineer to approve their PR. I would be pretty surprised if it was more robust that that.

[swiftcoder]

I haven't worked at GitHub either, but I did work at AWS, where a change to a production database required filing a detailed CM (change management form) with step-by-step details of the operations to be completed + monitoring criteria + rollback plans. That CM had to be approved by the senior eng staff of all affected teams, plus the full management chain, and in a high-profile issue like this, the PR/comms teams as well.

[bandyaboot]

> Essentially, it's a complete non-issue depending on whether Github cares about you. Would you like the police in your area to behave in this manner? I think not.

Obviously it would be nice to see A similar response from GitHub regardless of whether the issue at hand is affecting themselves versus a member of their community. But, as long as humans are making the decisions, that’s probably a pipe dream. And honestly, policing could very well be the standard example of this.