Let's be honest, we all have one or two.. and if you don't, then your one or two are coming. It's what you learned to do differently that I care about.
And if you don't have one, you're either a) incredibly lucky, b) too new to the industry, or c) lying.
When people say "making mistakes is unacceptable - imagine if doctors made mistakes" they ignore three facts:
1. Doctors do make mistakes. Lots of them. All the time.
2. Even an average doctor is paid an awful lot more than me.
3. Doctors have other people analysing where things can go wrong, and recommending fixes.
If you want fewer development mistakes, as a company you have to accept it will cost money and take more time. It's for a manager to decide where the optimal tradeoff exists.
This is absolutely it, of course it is possible to become so risk averse that you never actually succeed in getting anything done and there are certainly organisations that suffer from that (usually larger ones).
However some people seem to take the view that it is impossible to protect oneself from all risks therefor it is pointless protecting from any of them.
The good news is that usually protecting against risks tends to get exponentially more expensive as you add "nines" therefor having a 99% guarantee against data loss is a lot cheaper than a 99.999% guarantee.
Having a cronjob that does a mysqldump of an entire database, emails some administrator and then does rsync to some other location (even just a dropbox folder) is something that is probably only a couple of hours work.
This. I don't regret my life's many failures. I regret the times I've flamed out, blamed others, or ran away.
Doing things means making mistakes. You can spot a professional by how they deal with mistakes.
I asked similar, and agree that it's a really useful question.
I think it's an especially great one for startups, as successful candidates are more likely to come into contact with production systems.
For these positions you not only want people capable of recovering accidents, but also people who have screwed up because, conversely, they've been trusted not to screw up. Those who've never been trusted enough to not damage a system are unlikely to be of much use.
In most companies there's enough process to protect you from the big screw ups.