I was actually really impressed with this individual! For someone who has less than a year of experience, they're showing quite a bit of initiative, drive, and curiosity - which really are what make or break engineers as they develop. Taking the time to do a blog post (effectively a post-mortem) and share it is even better!

And yes - I've literally done this exact same error (with TB of video data!). Spending the following week remediating all of that data loss was a great lesson in patience and attention to detail. :-)

OP: If you're ever looking for a job be sure to send me a message. Contact info in profile.

Wrt "less than one year of experience", looking at Nikita's CV and GitHub, despite the title, they aren't really a junior developer :)

True, he's been teaching programming since at least 2018, I was in a similar boat where I'd been programming for almost 5-7 years for fun and profit before my first official fulltime job.

My mistake was on floppy disc with source code, other text files and images. Was hand editing (in hex disc editor) the floppy to get back the data, sector by sector. Fun times. Not going back there though :-)

Mine was a DELETE FROM Users; WHERE... Fun was had.

Usually the recommendation is to not start writing the DELETE query first. Write the SELECT query first and see the results. If you miss the WHERE clause, you will see that immediately. Then change SELECT * to DELETE. But I assume you have learned that lesson already :)

Yes, but it can't be stressed enough, always the first time for someone.

I think it was a great post. Reveals a knack for clarity in explanations. The mistake is simple enough and natural for a junior. If it were just one video or something, it would probably not even be noteworthy. I think the developer learned from the incident too. So all good.

I do think Vimeo was irresponsible in the whine affair though.

More importantly, this person is helping us learn from their mistake. This is something that should be encouraged, not mocked.

there's an argument that the best people around are the people who have already (or almost) made some big mistakes.

I have made a couple of huge ones - luckily I kept my job

When interviewing candidates I always enquire about their professional mistakes. Their reply often is the decider between hiring/rejecting.

I want to have colleagues who admit fault, be truthful about actions which lead to the issue, and learn from it. The learning includes organisations perhaps putting additional measures in place to prevent future issues.

One candidate told of a story how he was On-Call early in his career and was told situations happened so rarely, just to continue living life as normal.

Unfortunately for him, his pager went off at 02:00am while he was high as a kite on drugs - but felt he had to take action (mostly due to arrogance!).

He promptly deleted production data and things only got worse when he tried to rectify the situation.

Of course he was fired for his actions but ever since he's been stone cold sober when on-call.... just in case.

He learned a valuable lesson about professional responsibilities.

>When interviewing candidates I always enquire about their professional mistakes.

"You see, my biggest mistake was programming in the first place! Since then, it's just been an apology tour"

Don't fire for the mistake. Fire for the inability of someone to own it, cover it up, or point fingers at others.

His honesty of admitting to being off his nut while on-call led to his firing, not the action of deleting things.

>His honesty of admitting to being off his nut

This now my favorite euphemism for being high

It’s funny how so many managers on this board are like, yeah I focus disproportionately much on this one factor. Why? Because my intuition and experience says so.

I currently have about 12 years of experience, and a few years back I accidentally cleaned up GitLab's database a bit too well. I wouldn't be surprised if the people being dismissive simply never worked on a moderately complex and large system, and thus don't understand how easy it is to make these kinds of mistakes.

I’m impressed by their commitment to automation. If that was me, once I realized that manually uploading from Gdrive to Vimeo would fix the problem, I probably would have just committed myself to manually doing that all weekend. It would feel safer and serve as a sort of penance for screwing up the automation the first time.

But nope, they went right back to scripting and got it done.

LOL!

I have multiple years of experience than this man and still I could *very* *too* *easily* make a 7Tb mistake (or likely more :P )

This sort of mistake happens all the time when you write in multiple languages. A key solution is code review, a standard practice which doesn't seem to have happened here (and certainly isn't the fault of a junior).

Just to be fair also to some commenters, I think that the post had been edited after posting from what I remember ... so maybe the older comments are not very relevant.

To clarify, I only removed the company name and added the top disclaimer

I have done a lot of such blunders myself. Accidentally deleted my unchecked code and had to re-write everything from memory.

I envy those who claim to do no mistakes at all.

Don't envy them - they are deluding themselves.

I’ve been there! At least when you write it the second time it goes more quickly.