It's a shame really, as the engineers fighting the crisis' gets a lot of attention, but very often those crisis' are caused by themselves.
It is the engineers who's projects run smoothly who is ultimately worth more, as they can predict and prevent problems before they become a crisis, but get no recognition for it.
Yes, this. It reminds me of goalies in hockey, and how people are in awe when a goalie makes some ridiculous save when in fact the goalie would have never had to have made such a save if they hadn't been out of position in the first place. The best goalies are pretty boring to watch.
Yes! The Phillies used to have a fan-favorite outfielder who played hard and often made spectacular catches - but he was actually a pretty bad outfielder; the reason he made spectacular catches is because he turned routine plays into adventures.
I remembered now how some people considered the US goalie one of the best world cup players...
The thing is, he was considered one of the best world cup players because the US defense was so bad, but so bad, that without him US would have ended the cup losing all games outright.
In any sufficiently complex system, chaos can always rear its ugly head, no matter how good the engineers. The quality of engineers is then reflected in how well they respond to those cases. With space, you add other variables like micrometeors taking out a component or an errant cosmic ray flipping a bit at a really initiative time.
And on the other hand there are things even a number of engineers working together can't predict. Everybody makes mistakes, and having people who can work well under pressure is important regardless of whose fault caused the problem to begin with.
Yep, I think the ops / system admin saying should be "all my successes happened in the darkness and all my failures occurred in the harsh light of day".
It is the engineers who's projects run smoothly who is ultimately worth more, as they can predict and prevent problems before they become a crisis, but get no recognition for it.