Comment by vinceguidry
8 years ago
Technical infrastructure is often the ultimate in hostile work environments. Every edge is sharp, and great fire-breathing dragons hide in the most innocuous of places. If it's your shop, then you are going to have a basic understanding of the safety pitfalls, but you're going to have no clue as to the true severity of the situation.
If you introduce a junior dev into this environment, then it's him that is going to discover those pitfalls, in the most catastrophic ways possible. But even experienced developers can blunder into pitfalls. At least twice I've accidentally deployed to production, or otherwise ran a powerful command intended to be used in a development environment on production.
Each time, I carefully analyze the steps that led up to running that command and implemented safety checks to keep that from happening again. I put all of my configuration into a single environment file so I see with a glance the state of my shop. I make little tweaks to the project all the time to maintain this, which can be difficult because the three devs on the project work in slightly different ways and the codebase has to be able to accommodate all of us.
While this is all well and good, my project has a positively decadent level of funding. I can lavish all the time I want in making my shop nice and pretty and safe.
A growing business concern can not afford to hire junior devs fresh out of code school / college. That's the real problem here. Not the CTO's incompetence, any new-ish CTO in a startup is going to be incompetent.
The startup simply hired too fast.
The same thing could happen to senior. In particular, to tired overworked senior. It is more likely to happen to junior, because junior is likely to be overwhelmed. However, mistakes like this happen to prole of all ages and experience levels.
Seniority is what makes you not put the damm password into set up document. That was the inexperienced level of mistake. Forgotting to replace it while you are seting up day one machine is mistake that can happen to anyone.
True, but a senior engineer, even if he is never able to make architecture decisions, can still be held accountable for knowing better. That is precisely why they are paying him the big bucks.
If a shop is being held together with duct tape and elbow grease, then you should have known that going in, and developed personal habits to avoid this sort of thing. Being overworked and tired isn't an excuse. Sure, the company and investors have to bear the real consequences, but you as an IC can't disclaim responsibility.