There is a saying that: "future employers benefit from the mistakes of current
employees." An employee becomes more valuable, not less valuable, from having
made a mistake and learned from it.
Ultimately it is management who is responsible for mandating, instituting,
developing, and implementing protocols and procedures to prevent this from
happening.
Depending on the cost of an outage to the company (e.g. NASDAQ, eBay), there
are numerous things that can be done to prevent this from happening, from
changing the colors on Putty screens, to requiring two people to work together
any time there is a need to log into production, to prohibiting and even
preventing access to production unless there is an open service request or
change request.
I have worked at a company where one could not log into production without a
one-time-only code. One had to call the support desk to ask for a code. The
support desk would ask which ticket I was working on and record that.
Iggy
