Conspiracy theory not needed. I read a note on Twitter that beautifully described the ops situation: somewhere there's a process that writes a log file, and lo

Conspiracy theory not needed. I read a note on Twitter that beautifully described the ops situation: somewhere there's a process that writes a log file, and log rolling hasn't been automated for that one yet, and an engineer had it on their calendar to clean it out once a week. That engineer got fired, and with them the knowledge of the problem, the symptoms, and the solution. It may not be a log file being written, it may not be a disk filling up, it may not be a week, but a surprising amount of keeping a system going is institutional knowledge -- even in well-architected and well-developed systems. The detail is fractal and humans are the glue between machines.