If you guys could read the update I've posted in my blog I'd appreciate it. I cleared up a lot of assumptions you guys have been making. Most notably that I was fired due to this incident. I was not.

UPDATE:

First of all. Thank you. I made this post with hopes that someone out there can learn something from this. Needless to say I got a lot more than what I was expecting. I'm humbled by the attention and support I've gotten from everyone. Strangers and friends alike. The 10k I'll be getting will be going to charity to celebrate the integrity, compassion and passion demonstrated by the community at large.

I want to especially thank the Hacker News community for helping this get the attention I believe it deserved. The discussions it generated in the comments section was fruitful for everyone. Again, thank you all. None of this would've been possible without your help.

I'd rather not post original emails and screenshots supporting my claims. If verification is demanded by the majority I'll comply.

Don't bother. Hacker News is very likely to raise a cacophony about getting to see "original emails" and "screenshots" because those are dramatic, and people here like drama. You don't owe anyone more drama.

I think you're missing my point. :-)

I personally could care less whether you posted screenshots or not. But if you were considering employing someone and found that they had posted something like this (with little to no evidence), what would your reaction be? Heck, what would your reaction be if it did have screenshots?

It's "could NOT care less", unless you actually care a little and in fact could care less if not for that bit of care in your heart. If that is case, accept my sincere apologies.

Pardon my pet peeve.

To answer your question: if it were me hiring a person, absence or presence of screenshots would not make any difference. A contract is a contract and the person is owed $10k.

j_baker called it sarcasm. More generally, "could care less" is an idiom. It has a figurative meaning that is different from its literal meaning.

Here's a link to "could care less" in The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms, http://books.google.com/books?id=9re1vfFh04sC&pg=PA137&#...

It's called sarcasm. It's like how I say "Nice catch!" even though someone dropped the ball. Or like how someone who says "I could give a damn" probably doesn't.

Pardon my pet peeve.

To set the record straight I stuck around to fix it.

Irrelevant, and completely inappropriate for you to ask. The article writer disclosed that something bad happened for which he is to blame, which is a good thing ethically. He has no duty to tell a complete stranger what happened. Not only that, if he does then he may disclose confidential information.

Bottom line: don't answer this question.

Unless you're just generally curious of the company's internal process the details of his action/inaction to resolve a DB issue are completely unrelated to the dispute on wage.

Yes. I do want some attention. But really, I think anyone here can see that I have a lot more to lose here than to gain. If this was a matter of pride I'd leave it as a Facebook post for my friends and call it a day. To me, this is the right thing to do, not the smart thing. Unfortunately the two don't necessary come in pairs.

How is this the right thing? I don't imagine that your former coworkers are having a good day today with this kind of publicity. They had nothing to do with this matter, and did nothing to deserve the bad attention.

I understand that it's important to get the word out, but for me, I'd put the people I care about above anything else. All I'm saying is that this could have been handled more professionally.

I see this as doing your former coworkers a favor actually. They might not even know what type of person their boss is behind the scenes. The former coworkers might actually be happy that their boss was called out on shenanigans, to prevent future sleazy behavior.

i think you did the right thing to go public. As an employer i would have no problem with this.

But you shouldn't haven gone into details about their non-existent back-up strategy. This clearly shows their incompetance. This may fear future employers.

Any money that comes to me a result of this post goes straight to charity. You guys have my word.

You are under absolutely no obligation to do or say this, but if that's where you want it to go, good for you. I would be equally supportive if you promised to buy a hot tub with the money. You earned that cash.

That is your money, you earned them.

And there is nothing bad or evil about going to work for the money and expect others to hold up their end of the bargin.

It is what allows us to have the society we have today.

I want to emphasize that I don't really care for the money. It's the ethical implications of their decisions that I want to highlight.

For what it's worth, your intentions were clear to anyone who's actually read your post. Good luck, you did the right thing.

You're right. I'm definitely not proud of that.

To my coworkers defense the service was very new and we had plans to put in a backup system. Bad timing I guess.

This is part of risk management of a company. The company had decided to risk the production setup without a backup at the time. Obviously the downtime of the database is an acceptable risk to them. They could bear the consequence when luck turned against them. It should not be on your shoulder.

People make mistakes all the times. What's important is how they recover and be better. I remember a story where a guy was resigning after screwing up a million dollar venture. His boss told him, you have just learned a million-dollar lesson on the company's dime and you are quitting? The guy stayed on and flourished.

Don't feel bad about this. The decision to launch without backups was a legitimate business gamble. Blaming an engineer for the outcome of a business decision is plain bad management.

"With great power comes great responsibility."

No one is blaming your co-workers - but when your founders take investment money and insist on keeping themselves in charge, they also take on responsibility for the performance of the company and its technology. Just because their legal liability is limited, they aren't off the hook for what we think of them running their product this way.

Blowing the production database is bad, yes - but a LOT of bad days for top shelf programmers start with "rm". It sounds like you owned up to your mistake and put in the late nights to fix it in a way that your bosses didn't...best of luck to you.

You don't have to defend people who made a bad mistake worse. It's nothing personal, competent systems people are in short supply these days.

Do you claim of never having made any mistake?

Last I checked, humans do mistake all the time. Not related to systems, or anything really. It's all about being prepared for those and attempting to make as few as possible.

In order to avoid mistakes, you have to know they exist. So either they didn't know backups were important or they declined to prioritize and implement them in anticipation of their launch.

However, I sense you're taking issue with my "bad mistake worse" comment. I don't think anybody is going to argue that dropping a production database is a real mistake. Mistakes happen, and companies (i.e. management) should work to ensure that all the bases are covered, which weren't in this case.

Only important data is backed up. Only backed up data is important.

Everyone has plans to backup data... it isn't until they actually lose data before they think about a backup. This also means that anyone that actually has backups, has probably lost data in the past...

Never ever plan to backup, just backup.