One of my main interview questions is: Tell me about a time you thought you were going to get fired.

I want to hear about the bug they deployed, the customer issue, dropping the database, etc. I want to hear about how they realized their mistake and what they do differently as a result now. Basically, "what did you learn from it?"

Mine:

I once dropped the article table for [major news organization] which handled [large number] of updates each day. It was something stupid like "delete from articles where id = ~" and when it took more than a second, I realized my issue.. damage done.

Now, I avoid running sql queries directly whenever possible in favor of migrations. But I test those migrations on smaller/test databases which are normally backups of production to have the same structure, etc. And I always do a select first to make sure I get the results I expect.. then change it into a delete or update.