You must be popular and attractive because these kind of mistakes get normal people fired. This thread makes my stomach hurt thinking I might work with some of you.

Oh I'm not saying it's ethical or the right way to do things, just that it's common.

For example, there are loads of companies with very poor backup policies in place, or with all their eggs in one basket. There are loads of companies without any real 24/7 'on call' system.

For every person who is fired for doing some quick hack like this, there is someone who will be fired if they don't "Get it working today" (i.e. they'll get fired if they don't do the quick hack)

I'm about halfway through my first android app, and all the research I did said the same thing; never, ever connect directly to your MySQL database. I just wrote my own PHP script to deliver the results via JSON, it took me a few days to figure out but it wasn't that difficult.