Blameless recently had the privilege of hosting some fantastic leaders in the SRE and resilience community for a panel discussion. Our panelists discussed the effects of imposter syndrome especially during high tempo situations, how to use it to our advantage and overcome doubt, and how culture directly affects the availability of our systems. The transcript below has been lightly edited, and if you’re interested in watching the full panel, you can do so here.

It’s 3 AM and you are roused out of sleep by the dull buzzing of your phone in the other room. Some sort of emergency, you conclude as you fumble with the lockscreen. There it is: an alert that the API governing user registration is acting up. When we think about the lag between time of incident and time to respond, it’s not just about how long the system went down. How long it physically takes us to respond to the problem also contributes to lost downtime.