It was not the managements job to prevent the engineer from typing "rm". It was the managements job to make sure that typing "rm" would not result in big data l

It was not the managements job to prevent the engineer from typing "rm". It was the managements job to make sure that typing "rm" would not result in big data loss. This is, assuming the engineer was not already the highest ranking technical person in the company. I am very happy about their open post-mortem, so that anyone can learn from it. Reading it, it looks to me that the "rm" was not the cause of the disaster, it just triggered it. The real problem was the whole setup, which failed. And that is something, which falls under managements responsibility.