The trick is to make sure the heroic efforts are rewarded quietly, but the unheroic ones create lots of noise. This is inherently difficult because the heroic

The trick is to make sure the heroic efforts are rewarded quietly, but the unheroic ones create lots of noise. This is inherently difficult because the heroic efforts tend to come as a result of very noisy incidents - everyone already knows the database cluster was literally on fire and wants to hear how Jane put it out while simultaneously remagnetizing the backup drives. The lead's job is to make the noise ensuring everyone knows Morgan's the one who did the boring rewiring of the backup-restore process to automatically sync and fail over to another AZ when thermal metrics start trending bad. One thing I've noticed as we've been trying to integrate some on-call processes across formerly separate teams is that "our" incident reports were about 25% timeline/responses/impact analysis and 75% RCA and plans for future mitigations. "Theirs" were the opposite. Our incident rate has trended down sharply over the past two years even as our system grew; theirs has scaled up roughly at the same rate as their service count.