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I cannot talk for the whole company but I don't think I witnessed a culture of "firefighting glory", rather the opposite. There is a formal process to investig
by ex_amazon_sde 6y ago
I cannot talk for the whole company but I don't think I witnessed a culture of "firefighting glory", rather the opposite.
There is a formal process to investigate and correct errors after a non-trivial incident that requires collecting evidence and then discuss what happen, when, why and who did what with the whole team.
Then people ask the question "why was this not prevented or forseen?" and keep going backward until you exit the technical realm and look into people's choices.
The root causes could be, for example, that it was a management decision to prioritize something else over availability concerns... and the engineers are off the hook.
Sometimes one engineer was overworked and tired and did an error in good faith that is too difficult to prevent and avoid, and that's also acceptable.
Sometimes that the whole team ignored an availability issue in the product architecture, and that's bad.
And so on... Needless to say the outcome can impact people's performance review.