> I always felt like war rooms are a place for some leader to scream at you and not much else. The reality is that debugging some retry storm, resource exhaustion or whatever won't happen in a room with 18 people talking over one another.

I once walked out of a war room (at a much smaller company that I wouldn't be at for much longer) that had devolved into finger-pointing and blame games. Half an hour later, my boss came out to find out what I was doing and I pointed at my screen and said, "This. This is what's wrong. Ship my fix and we're done here." The entire war room came to my desk to see and discuss the fix, which we shipped, which solved the issue.

At my next job, I had to hold back laughter when the VP of Engineering, who was pushing mob programming, said, "Think about it. When we have an incident, when something is really important, what do we do? We all get in a room together. No one leaves the war room to go solve the incident on their own."