The best day in operations is a boring one.
Nothing paged. Nothing fell over. The systems just quietly did their job, and everyone got to think about something else. And here's the strange part about that kind of day: nobody notices it. There is no reward for the outage that didn't happen, no recognition for the disk you expanded the week before it would have filled, no thank-you for the certificate you renewed a month early.
This is the quiet unfairness of good operations work. The visible hero is the person who's up at 3 a.m. firefighting a production incident, sweating through a heroic recovery. The invisible one is the person whose careful, unglamorous work meant there was no incident to fight in the first place. We celebrate the first and overlook the second, and we have the incentives exactly backwards.
I've learned to measure my work by the incidents that never happened. The monitoring alert I added that caught a slow leak before it became an outage. The runbook I wrote so the next person didn't have to improvise under pressure. The single point of failure I quietly removed on a slow afternoon. None of it makes a good story. All of it is the actual job.
If you do operations well, your reward is silence. The systems stay up, the phone stays quiet, and the organization gets to forget you exist. That's not a failure to be recognized. That's the recognition, in the only form this work comes in.
So if you're the one preventing the fires nobody sees, know that the boring days are your best work. Someone should say thank you. Since they usually won't, I will.
– Serguey Shinder
