Be Present When Things Go Wrong

Production is down! All the alerts are going off! Everything is on fire!

But at least it's not your fault, so you might as well just have a pint and wait for this to all blow over, right?

You could. Or you could use this disaster as an opportunity to polish your incident handling skills. Figure out where the problem is being discussed. Understand the actions being taken to understand and solve it. Get involved. Maybe this means gathering information. Maybe people need help communicating and organizing efforts. Maybe you know something about the system in question that will speed things up or you can help push a fix faster.

Your involvement can be anything from taking command when you have the context to help mitigate the issue faster to taking notes so that the details are available for the RCA.

Never waste a good disaster.