The CEO has likely given this directive to avoid a paper trail. Any attempt at rationalizing with the CEO will be a waste of effort when this person could (and should) be focused on finding another place of employment.

This is bad advice. If you accidentally leave personally identifiable healthcare information on some random stage server and that server gets hacked, that is a federal crime. If the data and application code are very intertwined (likely in a pre-SOA era), it can be very difficult to version control code completely isolated from PII.

> If you accidentally leave personally identifiable healthcare information on some random stage server and that server gets hacked, that is a federal crime.

Not sure how that relates to Version Control? I personally don't put production (real) data on staging servers to begin with; always scrub your production clones or generate data for testing instances.

> If the data and application code are very intertwined (likely in a pre-SOA era), it can be very difficult to version control code completely isolated from PII.

Maybe I am naive (never had to work on DOS), but shouldn't the data be in a database/datastore/data directory that can be ignored by source control?

Huh? Why would the code have medical data in it?

If you were to take an api response and save it for testing, but not completely remove all personal information.

Easier than you'd think, or at least I could see it happening.

Apparently (according to a carpenter friend) - if the carpenter uses a hammer on a modern build it means something has gone wrong - they're normally using nailguns or similar to put things together - hammers are to bash them back apart again or knock them into alignment if they weren't done right the first time.

Hammers can also be used in awkward to reach places that a nail gun can't get to. Also, structural timber is very rarely straight or true. Knocking things into alignment is a very common part of framing, and hammers can achieve sub-millimetre accuracy with gentle tapping.

Yes, nail guns are awesome, but hammers are very useful tools.

I've done some work as a builders labourer. Admittedly ~18 years ago.

Nail Guns are awesome. Pneumatic, butane/battery and powder actuated all have their place and were heavily used. Always had a hammer on my belt though.

In particular, it's hard to use a nail gun to fasten a plate, hanger or bracket.

And to bring it back to the original poster - barely a day goes by that you don't need a ~hammer~ ... version control history.

LOL, yes nail guns are the more efficient tool these days, however I bet these carpenters still have a hammer on their tool belt and use it at least once a day.

I always thought it is more like making a building without a scaffold: when you're on the ground floor it doesn't look bad, but the more you build....