The Two Faces of Engineering Leadership

I log on to my laptop, check slack messages, and join a zoom support call. “What’s going on?” I ask. “We’ve got a problem with the database” my colleague responds. “Have we tried switching it off and on again?” I jest. My team have been investigating the issue for 4 hours. The joke doesn’t land well. I realise I’ve been paged because they need help. The engineers are fresh out of ideas, and our customers are impacted. My normal managerial duties of handling stakeholder comms and the odd morale boost are not gonna cut it. It’s time to roll my sleeves up and start debugging. I get into the logs, dashboards, understanding the state of different services in the stack. We rope in more help, expertise from around the business. We’re ssh’ing into machines to look, perform commands to see how we can release this database deadlock. “Try restarting the index service manually”, a database engineer says. “Kill command didn’t work”, my colleague replies. “Use kill -9 then check if the pid has changed”, I say. A moment of incite comes from an engineer. We scale back the client services to reduce pressure on the database. After many hours of trying various mitigations, this one works, and slowly we see normal service restored. <a href="https://medium.com/illumination/the-two-faces-of-engineering-leadership-6f685d02e6a6">Click Here</a>