There is the truth that here is someone who truncated the users table and because of that it caused the company great harm.

Here's another 'truth'.

1. The company lacked backups 2. The junior developer was on a production database.

Note: I'm from the oldschool of sysops who feel that you don't give every employee the keys to your kingdom. Not every employee needs to access every server, nor do they need the passwords for such.

3. Was there a process change? I doubt it, likely they made the employee feel like a failure every day and remind him of how he can be fired at any moment. So he did the only thing he could do to escape: Quit!

Horrible and wrong, if there was a good ethics lawyer around he would say it smells ripe of a lawsuit.

... That said, that lawyer and lawsuit won't fix anything.

If it hadn't been a junior developer who nobody noticed or cared was using the prod DB for dev work, it would have been an outright failure. DBs fail, and if you don't have backups you are not doing your damn job.

The CEO should be ashamed of himself, but the lead engineers and the people at the company who were nasty to this guy should all be even more ashamed of themselves.

Giving keys to irresponsible people seems irresponsible ;)

You should consider yourself very lucky. Or very savvy at knowing which companies to avoid.

This is actually one of the things most employees who have never been managers don't understand.

I mean, in fact I do something similar. At our company also a lot of stuff goes wrong. Somehow it surprises me that there was no major fuckup yet. But I do realize that I need to watch out all times that blame never concentrates on me.

It is so easy to blame individuals, it just suffices to have participated somehow in a task that fucked up. Given that all other participants keep a low profile, one needs to learn how to defend/attack in times of blame.

The reality is that fear is a greater motivator than any other emotion - over anger, sorrow, happiness. So companies create cultures of fear which results in productivity (at least a baseline, 'do what I need to do or not get fired' productivity), but little innovation and often at the expense of growth.

Plus, it's just hell. You want to do great things, but know you are stepping into the abyss every time you try.

I've worked as a Software Engineer at TechStarsNYC, Klicknation(acquired), Shelby and I'm currently working on Followgen

So, yes.

It's somewhat fascinating to hear that a company that damaged managed to build a product that actually had users. And I thought my impression of the social gaming segment couldn't go any lower.

Not surprised that this was a gaming company because lack of teamwork seems to be endemic in that industry.

    The correct way to respond to disasters like this is "we fucked up", not "someone fucked up".

its a fail on every possible level, the technical part beeing only minor.