If people can make catastrophic mistakes on your team, the process is broken.
Real-World Example: Git Branch Protections
An example is branch protections in a Git repository. These are rules that prevent engineers from deleting or altering history in shared branches, such as main, which on most teams would lead to a major problem.
Engineers don’t intend to delete or alter main, but it can happen when rifling through terminal commands. We’re moving fast, and occasionally we press enter on the wrong command. As a contributor, I expect policies to catch me when I make this mistake.
When they don’t, who owns the mistake? The team does, and the process needs to change.
To follow this example to the end: in Bitbucket, you can create branch protection rules that apply to each repo, or are inherited from a shared parent project. Once enabled, nobody can delete main, or alter its history. Not even the team lead or the 10x programmer, and certainly not the new programmer trying to find their way.
Conclusion
The solution here is simple guardrails to protect our team from human error, and grace when something does go wrong. It will, and it’s on the team to make individual corrections as needed, and most importantly, fix the process.
Note: I shared a version of this idea previously on Linkedin.