> Every now and then, there’s a nasty accident...

That may just be they aren't very good at risk assessment. Nasty accidents with a chainsaw are in a different league of damage for the person involved compared to, eg, accidentally deleting a database or upsetting a manager. A software engineer is all but guaranteed to walk away from deleting a DB with their limbs intact. Even if their manager gets really angry a dev is almost certainly going to survive the encounter.

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ChrisMarshallNY a day ago | parent | next [-]

Deleting a DB could have life-changing ramifications, depending on what's in the DB.

I used to write a lot of hardware-interfacing software.

The cool thing about writing things like device drivers, is that you can have some really kinetic bugs.

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withinboredom a day ago | parent [-]

You have bad catastrophe management if deleting a database causes issues. I've seen databases accidentally deleted in production ... we just restored from a backup losing only a few ms of writes.

This stuff happens; sure it causes downtime, but it shouldn't have any real ramifications.

	▲	ChrisMarshallNY a day ago \| parent [-]
		True. That's what good process and risk management gives you. I have blown up $40,000 receivers, though. Hard to restore from a backup.

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s_dev a day ago | parent | prev [-]

This doesn't account for safety critical systems or databases containing highly personal information or those in highly regulated industries. The software engineer might walk away with their limbs but others will fall to suicide or life changing financial circumstances.

I can't help but think of the software engineers who followed exactly what their Volkswagen bosses were instructing and are now in prison.

	▲	anonymars a day ago \| parent [-]
		> I can't help but think of the software engineers who followed exactly what their Volkswagen bosses were instructing and are now in prison. Huh? Are you conflating "I mistakenly pressed the wrong button" with "I was just following orders"?