The service went down at two.
Someone was awake until six,
found it, fixed it,
wrote the summary,
and got thanked by name
in front of the company.
That thanks was deserved.
Three months earlier
somebody else noticed
the same weakness,
spent a slow afternoon
making it impossible,
and told nobody,
because there was nothing to tell.
There is no graph
of the outage that did not happen.
That is the whole problem,
and no amount of fairness
in individual people
makes it go away.
Rescue is visible.
It has a timestamp,
a hero,
a story with an ending.
Prevention has none of those.
It looks like a quiet quarter,
and from a distance
a quiet quarter looks like
a quarter where not much was needed.
So the budget follows the fire.
The praise follows the fire.
And the careful engineer
looks faintly slow,
because work that makes
nothing happen
takes real time
and leaves no incident
to point at afterwards.
You cannot fix the structure.
You can stop being invisible inside it.
Keep your own record.
Not a list of tasks.
One short line each time.
What would have happened.
Who it would have reached.
Roughly what it would have cost.
Write near misses down
and send them round.
A near miss is the only shape
prevention takes
that other people can see.
The alert that fired
twenty minutes before
a customer would have noticed
is a story with a beginning
and an ending.
Tell it.
Say what nearly happened,
plainly, without the drama,
and let people feel the size of it.
And if anyone reports to you,
go looking,
because the person doing this work
is precisely the person
who will never mention it.
Ask what they stopped.
Ask what worries them
that has not broken yet,
and then fund it,
which is the only evidence
that you meant any of this.
Do not go bitter about it.
The invisibility is arithmetic,
not a verdict on you.
A quiet quarter is a result.
Somebody made it.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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