this is insanity! it was already pointed out in comments but i still can't believe a company that mature (actually having 1000's of users and millions in revenue!!!) would omit such a basic security precaution. Giving [junior?!] developers free reign in production database and no backups???? seriously, the CTO should have been fired on the spot instead of putting blame on developer.

no matter how careful you are (i'm extremely careful) when working with data, if you're working in dev/qa/uat/prd sooner or later someone on dev team will execute on wrong environment.