Quartz, on this Reddit story about a junior developer who inadvertently erased all data from the company’s production database:

The CTO told me to leave and never come back. He also informed me that apparently legal would need to get involved due to severity of the data loss. I basically offered and pleaded to let me help in someway to redeem my self and i was told that i “completely fucked everything up”…

This is a timeless tale, oft repeated. Some examples:

In December, a coding error in Snap’s latest iOS update accidentally jammed the network that keeps more than 15 million computer systems synchronized to the clock. A typo from a busy Clinton campaign aide inadvertently opened the door to the Russian hack of John Podesta’s emails. The British Airways power outage that disrupted tens of thousands of flights last week was reportedly caused by a tech support worker accidentally flipping the power off.

And this, about psychological safety:

An extensive review of employee teams at Google found that the most successful were those with a high level of psychological safety. In other words, when employees felt safe enough to take risks (and make mistakes) without being shamed or criticized, they did better work.

And:

“For all that’s wrong with Amazon, the best part was when someone fucked up, the team and the company focused only on how we make it never happen again,” a former employee wrote on the forum. “A human mistake was a collective failure, not an individual one.”

Terrific read.