In 2004 I was a summer intern after high school at a small software shop, they happened to be a subcontractor for a company providing a customs declarations tracking system for one of the largest container shipping companies in the world. In the first few days I was given access to a server running an instance of the system, I was given the impression that it was staging. I needed to restore a backup to fix a bug in the ASP 3.0 app. Being a Windows server I right clicked on the DB, and hit delete.

A few minutes later my boss gets a call saying someone is having trouble accessing the server. Turns out that single machine hosted staging and production. My boss kept his cool and we put up a more friendly error page saying it was down for maintenance, then started the 16 hour restore process. Somehow I kept my job, probably because he realized his incredible negligence.

The biggest impact I had was pushing the parent company to buy better servers, and set up proper isolated environments with minimal access. Preventing the situation from happening again.

I have hired close to one hundred engineers over my career, and I humble myself to every single one of them with this story. I want people to understand mistakes happen, how we handle them as a team is the most important thing I want to cultivate. I learned a lot from that job that became foundational to my career.