I absolutely agree with most of that you've said. But remember, this happened in an evaluation environment. Not a day to day work environment. If you can't fai

I absolutely agree with most of that you've said. But remember, this happened in an evaluation environment. Not a day to day work environment. If you can't fail an eval by locking yourself out and being unable to complete the task, how do you fail? The ideal is proper config management, test/stage/prod envs, automated deployment, etc. I've come close to that ideal at certain points in the past, but it's far from universal. Remember the problem is that OP was using unfamiliar tools and being careless. We have all made that mistake, but for it to happen in an eval or an interview has to be a failure. In day to day ops, it would be tough to justify giving root access. You want to pass or hire the person who will not do that because they have already cleaned up that sort of mess in the past. As OP states in followup, they weren't interviewing for a systems admin position, which does change the equation. If the eval board is sitting on your desk and requires just a firmware flash to recover, then OK, it's safe to not care so much.