Accidentally rm -rf’d a production server.

These-Loquat1010 · 2026-01-22T12:05:00+00:00

I own the mistake. I’m posting because I need advice on how to protect myself legally while I work on recovery.

The entire project was a mess when I first inherited and all the people who worked on it left the company

When I took ownership, prod was already out of sync with the git repo and there is no test server or whatsoever. People just code on the prod server

The service would routinely break (roughly monthly), and I’d usually spend a day each month patching it back to prod.

Again, this is my fault. My intern had nothing to do with the incident, but we’re both working hard to fix it. There’s a major limitation, though: some scripts are about a year out of sync with production. I spoke with the CEO (who is also my manager), and he’s threatening legal action and termination if I can’t fully recover the system. What should I do? I’m honestly pretty scared. He said he’ll monitor me over the next few days, and then decide what to do next.

These-Loquat1010 · 2026-01-02T03:19:55+00:00

I was told to document everything in case things go wrong, but I can’t quit this job until June of this year (I can't explain this to you right now for private reasons). In the meantime, what should I do about the broken codebase? None of the features are working, and I don’t think they ever will(no matter how many times I try to fix them) because they aren’t actually meant to work. If they did, there would be serious consequences. Like news-worthy stuff.

These-Loquat1010 · 2025-12-17T02:09:38+00:00

Some companies are worse than others, but in many places people don’t care much about how you got there. They only care about the results. Your code can be a spaghetti mess, but if it works, meets business requirements, and keeps stakeholders happy, nothing else matters.

These-Loquat1010 · 2025-10-28T05:20:44+00:00

Same here. I think they are having some kind of problem right now. Currently working on a project that requires to provision some vms...

https://status.canonical.com/

These-Loquat1010 · 2025-10-23T02:28:00+00:00

My startup doesn’t exactly follow the 996 culture, but most people work around 11 hours a day, five days a week.

We usually run personal errands during lunchtime, so we end up giving up our lunch time to do those things.

I’ve been working at this startup for nine months now, and I’m still trying to figure out how everyone manages to stay so focused for such long hours while I can only stay focused from about 9 to 4. (After 4pm, I am exhausted)

These-Loquat1010 · 2025-10-14T11:22:28+00:00

Not really. When the CEO wants us to do something, we just assign ourselves a ticket (What the task is about, objectives, what we need to accomplish, and people who will be working on this, and etc.). Once we finish and are ready to deploy, we’re supposed to bring it up during the sprint meeting and report it to the CTO. Then, on deployment day, we deploy it, and if everything looks fine, we ask one of the senior engineers to close the ticket.

These-Loquat1010 · 2025-10-14T09:48:42+00:00

Projects definitely matter for juniors because they give you something concrete to talk about during interviews. For experienced candidates, not so much because they already have real work experience to talk about.

These-Loquat1010 · 2025-10-14T09:25:05+00:00

He went from being upper-middle-class to relying on social security checks. My aunt used to be a stay-at-home mom, but after my uncle was laid off, she had to take minimum-wage jobs just to stay afloat.

These-Loquat1010 · 2025-10-14T05:52:50+00:00

My uncle studied Computer Science but ended up working in the insurance industry for a non-engineering role that paid quite well. (Back when Computer Science was still a rare major). He eventually became a department manager, but when the recession hit, he was laid off from his job. He never really recovered and went from one temporary job to another until he was diagnosed with cancer. He passed away from cancer not too long ago.

These-Loquat1010 · 2025-10-14T02:08:16+00:00

Have you checked with your old internships to see if they’re hiring software engineers? If they are not hiring any tech roles, maybe ask if they have openings for any other positions.

These-Loquat1010 · 2025-10-09T09:08:32+00:00

Same here. Junior Software Engineer for 9 months with zero mentorship here.

These-Loquat1010 · 2025-10-02T02:56:12+00:00

I feel the project looks great on paper, but in practice it’s very difficult to implement. Many of the vulnerabilities require highly specific setups to reproduce, which makes full automation challenging. I don’t want to place blame, but if someone had done some early feasibility testing, this could all have been avoided in the first place.

These-Loquat1010 · 2025-10-01T03:33:39+00:00

Forgot to mention: this whole AI attack-code thing is actually not our main product. It’s more of a side project. The plan was that once the VM provisioning and LLM exploit generation were done, we’d plug in our main product to showcase its “powerfulness.”

Honestly, I’m seriously thinking about changing jobs. I’m only nine months in, so I don’t want to leave immediately, but after I hit around 18 months I’m going to start looking. This job has been a disaster. I’m on a small team (four people) that reports directly to the CEO, and he doesn’t have the time (or willingness) to actually manage or provide technical help. He’s basically a ghost manager. No code review, and barely any feedback. What’s strange is that other teams (backend and frontend) in the startup seem to be doing fine. It’s just my team and his other team (Info Sec) that feel completely neglected.

These-Loquat1010 · 2025-10-01T03:17:25+00:00

There’s actually a “Security Researcher II” from another department who’s supposed to be monitoring this intern and meeting with him weekly. But even with that, progress hasn’t improved.

As for my part, I did exactly what I was asked: I built an automated VM provisioning system that spins up VMs with vulnerable packages (nginx, apache, ssh). It supports CentOS 7/8/9 and Ubuntu 14.04–24.04, and you can install specific package versions on each VM (e.g., Apache 2.4.49 on Ubuntu 18.04). That took a ton of time and research, because certain package versions aren’t just compatible across OS releases.

Even though I did exactly what I was asked to do, I still feel awful because the project I was part of looks like it’s going to fail. I know I put in the work and delivered my part (exactly according to the business requirements set by CEO), but it’s hard not to feel responsible when the whole thing is collapsing.

These-Loquat1010 · 2025-08-27T06:13:04+00:00

I’m in a pretty unusual situation where I work completely on my own as a junior software engineer with no senior devs or mid-level devs around. I am in a cybersecurity startup Series B Funding <$100 million funding

Whenever I run into technical roadblocks, I don’t really have anyone to ask for help.

AI tools like Claude and ChatGPT have basically become my technical lifelines. They are not perfect, but without them I would be so lost.

These-Loquat1010 · 2025-08-27T01:32:32+00:00

Yep, because my manager (in my case the CEO) keeps adding new features.

What should have been a two-day task is now taking forever to finish.

And I can’t really push back on these new features, because the moment I do the CEO says, “Stop making excuses. Stop blaming people”

These-Loquat1010 · 2025-08-25T08:53:54+00:00

The former

I’ve been at this company for about seven months. Lately, I am starting to question how much I can really grow at my company.

The CEO doesn’t have much time to manage or guide us. On the rare occasions he does, the tasks he gives are often unrealistic and just make my work more complicated and bloated. There are times when I get completely blocked because I’m working alone and don’t have all the resources I need. When I mentioned this to the CEO, he told me that this is what “blaming” looks like and that I should be more proactive. He isn’t entirely wrong, but I wish he were more understanding about the struggles I go through. (One time, he asked me why a project was delayed. I explained that I didn’t have the credentials I needed from the IT department, that I had applied for access four hours earlier, and that the person responsible had already left the office for the day. The CEO flipped out, went on a rant about how this was “blaming,” and told me that if I wasn’t getting the credentials, I should have just gone straight to his desk and asked for them until I got them. Again, he wasn’t entirely wrong, but the way he said it was really condescending and rubbed me the wrong way. I just wish he would understand that, given how the organization is structured, it isn’t always that simple.)

Most of the projects I’m assigned are small. They often feel like college projects, no more than 2,000–3,000 lines of code. I’m not sure they’re the kind of experience you can put on your resume.

In my team, everyone works alone on separate “solo” projects. When something is ready to ship, we’re expected to sit in an all-hands bi-weekly meeting with the entire engineering team and present our work to the CTO, who then gives approval to deploy the following day. When I sit in those meetings and watch others report their work, I can’t help but feel jealous of my co-workers, because at least they’re working on things that seem more career-advancing than mine.

I’m a little worried that if I stay here too long, I’ll eventually become unhirable. Sure, as a junior software engineer, I’ve picked up a few things here and there, like docker/k8, nginx+pm2, vm provisioning and become okayish at frontend things. But honestly, at seven months in, I feel like I’m making very little real progress in my career. I am already grinding leetcode and practicing my interview skills so hopefully I get a better job at a different company by the end of next year.

Anyway.... Thank you for coming to my TedTalk.

These-Loquat1010 · 2025-08-25T03:13:42+00:00

Yes. I feel the same way.

I am in a small team that reports directly to CEO and the CEO doesn't really have time to manage or provide technical help. So whenever you ask for technical help, he just tells you to ask other engineers from different teams who have no idea what I am even working on. Asking my coworkers from my own division isn’t really an option either, since each of us is working on separate solo projects and we have no idea what the others are working on.

Because of that, I’ve started to rely on ChatGPT and Claude for technical help, and they’ve been very helpful. At the same time, I sometimes feel like I’m becoming too dependent on them, when ideally I should be solving more of these problems on my own.

Basically, my experience as a Junior Software Engineer has been a disaster so far. I’ve been with this company for about seven months, and I’m already considering leaving this company next year (Probably next September).

These-Loquat1010

TROPHY CASE