Dev deleted a branch I was working on. When I asked him why, he responded "I don't know. I didn't create the branch so I thought I could delete it"

Frack!

I just hope he doesn't get fired. Is he always like this?

@tahnik No, no would get fired for that. Rollbacks are easy enough.

Have to remind myself he's going through a divorce and has 4 kids (and its not going well) ...saying "I don't know why ...." may be a 100% valid excuse right now.

If he 'pulls a Paul'* and comes to work in pajama pants, it might be time to consider a more administrative punishment.

*Paul was a developer who got divorced and his wife took everything (no kids, thank goodness)...house, his truck, etc. We think he was 'living' out of a rental car and would randomly cause havoc in our code base (too much to write here). He got a pass because we could fix the code and we felt sorry for him. One day he came to work still in his pajamas.
When the boss asked him ..
Boss: "Paul, are you wearing pajamas?"
Paul: "Oh..gosh..um..yea..sorry, I guess I forgot to change."
Boss: "It's OK. Go home, change and come back."
Paul: "Why?"
Paul was fired that day.

Well you didn't hire him, I think you could fire him...

@hortensis I think sometimes when you continue to work on that branch from another machine like at home, you have to push it upstream.

@qbasic16 is that advisable or professional? I mean, if it's your personal work, why not just fork it then maintain that fork, merge stuff in and out of work, instead of pushing your branch upstream in everyone's dev environment? Most companies don't even let you copy the repo.

@silverbyte at one of my jobs we always work in our own forks and PR back to the base, works flawlessly.. at another job everything is in the same fork and generally just on dev branch, constantly have issues with it.

All our accounts are part of a GitHub org, never had that many security/privacy concerns but I can see it being an issue for other companies.

@brod that's what I thought the sane thing to do. That's what we're doing at our company as well. If somebody pushed their personal branch upstream it will get deleted instantly. No one will bat an eye. They will even scold you that the base repo is not your personal playground.

@silverbyte @brod @CorruptComputer Thanks for your inputs. Currently our company is only 3 devs big and we mostly work on separate projects, so we currently all push to the same fork of a project. But I will definitely bring that forking up to my boss. It sounds much more reasonable than single fork with personal branches.

@qbasic16 yeah, depends heavily on circumstance, but managing your own fork and submitting PR's is good practice for working within the git ecosystem imo