Success is measured in features shipped per quarter

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

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

Runbooks are out of date within a month of being written

Feature work always outranks reliability work in planning

Post-mortem actions are written up and then never scheduled

Every team has its own logging format

Load tests were last run before the customer base doubled

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

One engineer knows how the payment path actually works

Dependencies are upgraded only when something breaks

Tests that fail intermittently are retried until green

Migrations are run by hand from a laptop

Error budgets exist on a slide and nowhere else

Alerts fire so often that on-call mutes them

Customers report outages before monitoring does

The staging environment does not resemble production

Rollbacks take longer than the outage they are meant to end

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

Capacity is added after the outage, never before

The same three services cause most of the pages

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

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

Reliability has no budget line of its own

Retries are unbounded, so a slow dependency becomes a flood

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

Config lives in five places and drifts between them

Nobody owns the shared database schema

Incidents are declared late because declaring one feels like blame

The service map in the wiki is two years old