Count to ten when a plane goes down
My first thought after reading the article was that it was ridiculous to fire/scapegoat the author for hitting the wrong key, too. This has happened to me before, where a single keystroke ( in my case, a line break in a config file ) caused me to take down a production system. My punishment? Designing a more robust system that would protect itself from a badly formatted config file. To this day, ten years later, a similar error has not been repeated, despite several attempts of people to push bad config files to our production systems. If I had been instead fired, no doubt a similar, but perhaps not exact, error would have been repeated every year or so.If I had made the same mistake twice without any attempts to fix the situation long term, then, yes, I think that would have been a fire-able offense.If you're working with people who care primarily about their own positions and egos without regard to the team as a whole, well, be prepared to be thrown under the bus when it comes time for those people to protect themselves.