I worked at a small web hosting company that did probably £2m in revenue a year in my first programming job. They had me spending part of my time as support an

I worked at a small web hosting company that did probably £2m in revenue a year in my first programming job. They had me spending part of my time as support and the other part on projects. After about 3 or so months they took me took me out of support and literally placed my desk next to the only full time programmer that company had. They made all changes direct on live servers and I'd already raised this as a concern and now that became my full time job it was agreed that I'd be allowed to create a dev environment. Long story short, I exported the structure of our MySQL database and imported it into dev. Some variable was wrong so it didn't all import, so I changed the variable, dropped the schema and back to redo. Yeah that was the live database I just dropped. After a horrible feeling that I can't really explain I fessed up. I dropped it during lunch so it took about two hours to get a restore. The owner went mad but most other people were sympathetic, telling me their big mistakes and telling me thats what backups were for. The owner was going crazy about losing money or something and the COO pulled me into a room. I thought I was getting fired but he just asked me what happened and said "yeah we all make mistakes, thats fair enough, just try not to do it again". I was then told to get on with it and it must have took me a day to finish what would have taken me an hour but I done it and now we had a process and a simple dev environment. I lasted another two years there. I left over money.