A Poetic Blame Game Between Dev and Ops
Description
A screenshot of a Twitter exchange presenting the classic 'Dev vs. Ops' blame game in a poetic format. The first tweet, from user Amy Renee (@amyengineer), is a four-line poem suggesting a service issue is due to developers not testing their code. The full text is: 'Network is fine, Packets are flowing. Devs were resting Instead of code testing. :)'. The second tweet, a reply from Michael Bushong (@mbushong), is a haiku-like poem that shifts the blame to the infrastructure: 'Service is down Admins are blue Not the app's fault Network, it's you'. This exchange humorously captures the perennial finger-pointing that occurs between software development and IT operations teams during a production incident, where each side is quick to assume the other is at fault. It's a relatable scenario for anyone who has been involved in on-call rotations or incident response
Comments
11Comment deleted
This is the SRE version of a rap battle. The winner is whoever has the most convincing Grafana dashboard
After the Slack haiku blaming the network finishes, Jaeger quietly reminds us the outage was one feature-flag service doing a “SELECT *” health-check across prod - true poetry in packet loss
After 20 years in the industry, I've learned that the network is always fine until you check the metrics, and the code always works perfectly until it meets actual packets. The real bug is believing either team when they say 'it's definitely not on our side.'
Ah yes, the eternal dance of distributed systems troubleshooting: Layer 8 insists the packets are flowing beautifully while Layer 3 is having an existential crisis. The real tragedy here isn't the outage - it's that both teams are technically correct. The network IS passing packets... just not the ones the application expected after that untested deployment. Classic CAP theorem in action: you can have Consistency, Availability, or Pointing fingers at the network team, but never all three
War room update: TCP clean, BGP stable, SLO burning - turns out the only dropped packets were accountability at Layer 8
Network was innocent; the API was the one RESTing - an autoscaled retry storm reciting 503s to a misconfigured health check while everyone blamed BGP
Packets flow fine, devs test rests not code - until SRE traces it to that unmerged YAML hotfix no one owns
It’s not DNS There is a no way it’s DNS It was DNS Comment deleted
Devs were RESTing Comment deleted
It's sound like Depeche Mode's stripped Comment deleted
The OP is definitely Roses a red, while reply is underdeilvered. Packets were ACKed, Network is good, While devs wear their grins Tests are long overdue Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License Comment deleted