Yeah when I read that my first thought was that the CTO reacted that way because he was in fear of being fired himself. I wouldn't be at all surprised if he wrote that document or approved it himself.
Note that I'm not talking about the situation in this article. That was a ridiculous situation and they were just asking for trouble. I'm asking about the perception that is becoming more and more common, which is that no matter what mistakes you make you should still be given a free pass regardless of severity.
Is it the quantity of mistakes? Severity of mistakes? At what point does the calculus favor firing someone over retaining them?
In my opinion, mistakes should never be considered the person's fault. The development process should be designed to prevent human mistakes. If mistakes happen, that only means the process has been designed poorly.
World's worst on-boarding guide!
I know startups are a limit case, but we didn't bother to make those sorts of distinctions for this article, so it's worth considering.
If someone is still expected to be learning, mistakes (even large ones) are to be expected. Incompetence has to be judged against reasonable expectations. In the case here, there was a series of pretty severe mistakes, but deleting the database isn't what I'm thinking of.
Protecting the database was the job of the more experienced employees of the company, and ultimately the CTO. Some combination of people at the company were negligent, and the absence of actions taken to protect their systems shows a pattern of irresponsible behavior.
In this case, it's not a matter of degree, it's a matter of responsibility. The junior dev is absolutely not the one responsible for the prod db getting blown away, and is absolutely not responsible for the backups not being adequate. As somebody else mentioned, this is like leaving the electric cable to the production system strewn across the office floor, then firing the person who happened to trip over it.
I agree somebody's job should be in jeopardy, especially if the backups weren't adequate: not for a single mistake, but for a long series of bad decisions and shoddy oversight that led to this.
I like this definition.