Incident response Memes

The financial calculus of software development hits different at 3 AM when your servers are burning. That $150/hour senior dev you rejected? Suddenly looks like a bargain when compared to the $50,000/minute revenue loss from your payment system being down. The technical debt collector always shows up at the worst possible time, and unlike regular debt collectors, this one charges compound interest in the form of your engineering team's sanity and your customers' trust. Pro tip: The cost of prevention is always cheaper than the cost of the cure.

The fresh-faced junior dev who believed the lie that "oncall isn't too bad" has clearly been transformed into a shell of his former self. Those promised "runbooks" for another team's systems? Yeah, they're either wildly outdated or just a single README file saying "good luck!" This is what happens when you're woken up at 3AM by cryptic alerts for systems you've never seen before, while the senior devs who actually built the monstrosity are peacefully sleeping with their phones on silent. The only documentation? A Confluence page last updated in 2019 that just says "TODO: finish documentation".