Runway 34 — A Production Incident Post-Mortem

I watched Runway 34 over the weekend; I must say, the movie is well made; impressive plot, fine acting, and great storytelling.
However, that’s not what this blog is for.

Over the last few years, we’ve seen several real life incidents of a first responder, especially a police officer, acting a certain way when a routine pull-over goes south. This results in the cop’s actions being scrutinized by the media, and subsequently, the people; similar to what the movie shows happened with the pilot.

For both of these scenarios — a cop’s actions in a pull-over case and the pilot’s actions in the movie, I mentally make a comparison to a software reliability engineer working on restoring an unresponsive eCommerce website (this is why I, an SRE/Cloud architect, am writing a movie review :)). Imagine this — I am the engineer in the driving seat whose responsibility is to restore the infrastructure a website is running on. In the heat of the moment, I issue a command that results in a server being mis-configured, resulting in a delay in restoration. Should I be penalized for this?

In hindsight, there are many things that seem reasonable and obvious, whereas in the heat of the moment, the expert on the job is in a pressured situation with valuables — life, revenue etc- at exponentially rising risks with every second counting on the clock.

I am in no way speaking of the #georgefloydmn case here; that was an extreme case, and has received a well-deserved court verdict. Nor am I supporting recklessness in such high damage potential incidents. The point I am trying to make here — the reviewer, whether it be us or the media, in such cases is responsible for putting themselves in the expert’s shoes, in the situation they were in.

Sitting in front of TV screen and cursing a wrong decision is easy. Empathizing is not.