Once I was put in charge of running regularly some DB scripts for a social site (non profit, not a payed job) with about 10K active users. It was all manual as

Once I was put in charge of running regularly some DB scripts for a social site (non profit, not a payed job) with about 10K active users. It was all manual as the nobody had the time and skill to automate it. There was no development site, there was only production so adding any automation was also risky. And of course one fateful Sunday I pasted a script that was not properly adjusted and the DB was fubar. It took us more than a day to recover - thankfully we had a recently current backup. Later we all spoke about it and also did a write-up. The debriefing helped a lot processing the shock but for a long time I loathed to log into the DB. When I'm fully in control I engineer things in a way that make disasters unlikely and easily recoverable. But that is not always possible. I tend to avoid touching any production DB but again that is not always possible. I always believed I have a developer mindset more than an operational mindset and worked more in roles compatible with the former than the larger. When looking at the devops culture I always wonder whether the lessons of strict control of production environments are getting enough attention. There is value is closing the gap between the two world but please leave a gap.