Dev vs. Ops Poetry Slam: The Blame Game
Description
A screenshot of a Twitter conversation where two tech professionals write short poems to blame each other for a service outage. The first tweet, from Michael Bushong (@mbushong), is a quatrain that reads: "Service is down, Admins are blue, Not the app's fault, Network, it's you," which squarely blames the network infrastructure. The reply tweet from Amy Renee (@amyengineer) counters with her own poem: "Network is fine, Packets are flowing. Devs were resting, Instead of code testing. :)". This interaction humorously captures the classic finger-pointing and tribalism that often occurs between development and operations/sysadmin teams during production incidents. The joke resonates with anyone who has been in a war room, trying to identify the root cause of a failure while different teams defend their domains
Comments
8Comment deleted
The quickest way to get developers and network admins to agree on something is to suggest the problem might be DNS
Blameless RCA bingo: network claims “packets pristine,” devs counter “CI all green,” SRE circles “transient DNS anomaly,” and we all silently raise the retry budget again
The best part of any production incident is watching two teams prove the other is at fault using completely different observability stacks that both show everything is working perfectly
Incident retro haiku: it's not DNS / there's no way it's DNS / fine, the devs skipped tests - somehow that's still the network team's pager
Ah yes, the eternal dance of distributed systems troubleshooting: developers insist their code is perfect and packets are flowing, while network admins point to clean tcpdumps and blame application logic. The truth? It's usually a race condition in a microservice that only manifests under production load, triggered by a subtle MTU mismatch that neither team thought to check. But sure, let's write poetry about it instead of implementing proper observability and distributed tracing
Blameless postmortem: network was innocent; our L7 retries without jitter turned a transient blip into a self‑DDoS
If packets flow and the service doesn’t, congratulations - you’ve built a distributed system where the only reliable transport is blame
Classic outage choreography: Devs pirouette around untested code, while neteng spotlights the app's CAP theorem surrender