Count me among those wishing...
...that "whoever wrote the docs" was an option in the survey.
Really, though, I don't think anyone *needs* to be fired over the actual failure. It's a small company, and they just experienced the results of a comedy of collective errors across various people that are probably the result of technical debt accrued as they got up and running. This never has to happen, but it's pretty common. It's bad, but you learn, adjust and move on. Well, you move on unless the lack of backups in this case means they are so thoroughly screwed that they have to shutter the business.
All that said, I do think the CTO needs to go, not necessarily because this happened, but for how he's handled this. Politically, he might have needed to go anyway by virtue of falling on his sword for owning the collective failures of the team(s) under his control, but the obvious scapegoating of the new hire for what's a really broad failure of IT processes says to me that he's not going to learn from this and get his ship right. One way or another he needs to own this, and firing the new guy who copy/pasted commands right from an internal document doesn't convey that kind of ownership to me.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
