He's not an IT 'pro' if he:
1. failed to take a hdd backup;
2. failed to check what was on a hdd before binning it;
3. failed to physically destroy the hdd before binning it.
Not a 'pro' in any means of the word.
Just because you're a pro doesn't mean you follow standard data protection procedures on your home computers. I'm a computer guru, and honestly only *some* things are backed up on my computer. If my hard drives die, I lose a lot of things--many of which are replaceable, and in 2011 after the mtgox hack, I guarantee you I wouldn't have cared too much if $200 worth of BTC could've gotten lost. Yeah I'd shrug it off, get a little irritated, and that's it.
Sometimes you just forget things. There's a reason why in a professional work environment, if you work in IT, there's SOPs and checklists you follow before throwing equipment out with possibly important data. With personal stuff, you sometimes just do a quick check in your brain and then bam. I'm a prolific ROM flasher on Android and I love continuity. While I've managed to flash my phones probably 100+ times, I've managed to keep all my texts from 2007 and on. I've managed to keep my Whatsapp conversations intact since 2010 except the one time just one month ago when I accidentally wiped my /sdcard folder. Am I now a newb? It's easy to mess things up, but if I were doing this for work, I'd be extra careful. We all know that you *should* do a Nandroid before you flash, or you should have multiple layers of redundancy, and have offsite backup, blah blah blah, but hindsight is always 20/20.