Tests that fail intermittently are retried until green

Customers report outages before monitoring does

The on-call rota has the same two people on it most weeks

Leadership asks for a root cause within the hour, so the first plausible one wins

Reliability has no budget line of its own

Every team has its own logging format

Success is measured in features shipped per quarter

Dependencies are upgraded only when something breaks

The service map in the wiki is two years old

Deploys go out on Friday afternoons because that is when the sprint ends

Post-mortem actions are written up and then never scheduled

Rollbacks take longer than the outage they are meant to end

Runbooks are out of date within a month of being written

Migrations are run by hand from a laptop

Post-mortems assign actions to people who were not in the room

Feature work always outranks reliability work in planning

There is no time set aside after an incident, so the write-up is done at midnight

Feature flags are never cleaned up, so nobody knows which paths are live

Config lives in five places and drifts between them

Incidents are declared late because declaring one feels like blame

Load tests were last run before the customer base doubled

The same three services cause most of the pages

One engineer knows how the payment path actually works

Error budgets exist on a slide and nowhere else

The staging environment does not resemble production

The incident channel fills with people asking for status instead of giving it

Nobody owns the shared database schema

Retries are unbounded, so a slow dependency becomes a flood

Alerts fire so often that on-call mutes them

Capacity is added after the outage, never before