Average vs Exceptional

Few years ago, I was debugging a issue or problem with two engineers.

One had 2 years of experience. The other had 7 years of experience.

What happened next taught me everything about what separates average from exceptional.

The system was down. We were losing money every minute.

The junior engineer immediately started checking logs, running commands, switching between monitoring tools.He was working hard, really hard. But after 20 minutes, he turned to me and said, "I'm stuck. What should I check next?"

Meanwhile, the senior engineer sat quietly for a minute. Then he asked one question: "What changed in the last 24 hours?" Within 5 minutes, he found the problem. A minor configuration change in a completely different service was causing a cascade effect which was fixed in 2 minutes.

But here's what really struck me...

After we fixed it, the junior engineer said, "Great, crisis over. Back to work."

But that senior engineer spent the next hour documenting what happened, creating monitoring alerts for this specific scenario, and explaining to the team how to prevent it with human-less automations.

Then he said something I will never forget: "The real problem was not the outage. It's that we allowed this to happen in the first place."

Also, over the years, I have noticed this pattern repeatedly.

Average engineers are firefighters. They are good at putting out fires when they happen. They know their tools. They follow runbooks. They get the job done.

But the best engineers? They are fire prevention specialists.

For example, when everyone else is celebrating a successful deployment, they are thinking about what could go wrong in 6 months.

And one more thing to add here "When you stop celebrating that you saved the day and start questioning why the day needed saving in the first place."

That's when you stop being average and become EXCEPTIONAL.

Summary and Conclusions

Always analyse issues or problems as System Porblem and work on fixing System prevents problem itself.

Author

Sagar Mehta is Atgen Software Solutions Founder and a recognised expert in the field of Intelligent Automation, including Robotic Process Automation, Workload Automation, DevOps, SRE and Advanced Analytics. Sagar advocates a pragmatic approach to Automation, encouraging a policy of using ‘the best tool for the job’.

Prior to co-founding Atgen Software Solutions, Sagar worked in Senior Automation roles, architecting and delivering robust, scalable solutions for many of the world’s biggest banks and working with leading Automation vendors. He developed his first automated solution in 2006 and has continued to deliver robust, scalable and sophisticated Automation ever since.

Sagar is a regular guest speaker and panellist at Technology seminars, conferences and user group events.