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Comment by stevewepay | Hacker News Reader

On the contrary, this is where you can really prove that you are worth your salt. There is no better arena to prove yourself than a real-live production-down situation.

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It's a shame really, as the engineers fighting the crisis' gets a lot of attention, but very often those crisis' are caused by themselves.

It is the engineers who's projects run smoothly who is ultimately worth more, as they can predict and prevent problems before they become a crisis, but get no recognition for it.

And may even get the boot, because the beancounters wonder what said engineer is really doing for the paycheck...

I guess it can be seen as some variant of the Lucas Critique.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucas_critique

And on the other hand there are things even a number of engineers working together can't predict. Everybody makes mistakes, and having people who can work well under pressure is important regardless of whose fault caused the problem to begin with.

Yes, this. It reminds me of goalies in hockey, and how people are in awe when a goalie makes some ridiculous save when in fact the goalie would have never had to have made such a save if they hadn't been out of position in the first place. The best goalies are pretty boring to watch.

Yes! The Phillies used to have a fan-favorite outfielder who played hard and often made spectacular catches - but he was actually a pretty bad outfielder; the reason he made spectacular catches is because he turned routine plays into adventures.

I remembered now how some people considered the US goalie one of the best world cup players...

The thing is, he was considered one of the best world cup players because the US defense was so bad, but so bad, that without him US would have ended the cup losing all games outright.

In any sufficiently complex system, chaos can always rear its ugly head, no matter how good the engineers. The quality of engineers is then reflected in how well they respond to those cases. With space, you add other variables like micrometeors taking out a component or an errant cosmic ray flipping a bit at a really initiative time.

Yep, I think the ops / system admin saying should be "all my successes happened in the darkness and all my failures occurred in the harsh light of day".

This is a pretty common sentiment among firefighters/paramedics. You don't wish for something bad to happen to someone, but you absolutely want to be there if it does.

It might be a shame when your real-live production-down situation is a multimillion dollar space probe nine years into a mission to capture the first high-resolution imagery as well as collect mounds of scientific data about one of the (ex-)planets in our solar system we know the least about, right after discovering surface anomalies including four suspicious dark spots on one of the body's faces.

This isn't about proving you're worth your salt. It's about "let's get this thing working, ASAP, because who knows when we'll have another chance, since there's not exactly a plan B."

"Proving oneself" is not a thing everyone values.

That assumes you're proving yourself to a rational engineer - rather more likely one would be attempting to prove oneself to a non-tech manager, and what happens there is that typically the fixer is so deeply associated with the problem that they end up being seen as the problem.

I mean, how many times have you fixed a downed server through no fault of your own to then have your head blown off by a client?

I beg to differ, a situation with a lot of factors you can't control is rarely a way to prove that you're worth your salt, It's the way you communicate your advancements what makes a difference.

Being "worth your salt" definitely includes situations out of your control, because you need to be able to handle issues that probably aren't in your control. You're only useful if you can help with the current issues...

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