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If an engineer causes an outage by mistake and then ensures that would never happen again, he has made a positive impact.

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I understand that, but eventually they need to evaluate performance, for promotions, demotions, raises, cuts, hiring, firing, etc. How is that done?

It’s standard. Career ladder [1] sets expectation for each level. Performance is measured against those expectations. Outages don’t negatively impact a single engineer.

The key difference is the perspective. If reliability is bad that’s an organizational problem and blaming or punishing one engineer won’t fix that.

[1] An example ladder from Patreon: https://levels.patreon.com/

> The key difference

The key difference between what and what?

Your approach and their approach. It sounded like you have a different perspective about who is responsible for an outage.

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