Why Your Production Disaster Isn't the End of the World
Your Broken Deploy Isn't a Career Ender, Your Panic Is
You’ve just taken down production. Your Slack notifications are exploding. Your heart is doing that thing where it feels like it’s trying to escape through your ribcage. And somewhere in the back of your panic-soaked brain, a voice is screaming, “Everyone thinks I’m an idiot. I’m getting fired. My career is over.”
Let’s talk about that voice.
The Panic Brain vs. The Problem-Solving Brain
Here’s what happens in those first few seconds after you realize you’ve screwed up: your brain goes into full catastrophe mode. It’s not thinking about rollback procedures or database transactions. It’s writing your termination letter, imagining the disappointed looks from your team, and probably planning your new career as a barista.
This is where Marcus Aurelius has something useful to tell us about our broken deployment. He called it “the view from above,” and it’s not some woo-woo meditation thing. It’s a mental zoom-out that strips away the panic and lets you see what actually matters.
From the vastness of space, your failed deploy is invisible. Not because it doesn’t matter, but because your catastrophic thinking about it matters even less.
Think about it this way: Will this outage matter in a month? A year? At your retirement party? Most production incidents fade into forgotten anecdotes. The ones you remember become the war stories you tell over beers. “Remember that time I accidentally deleted the production database?” (Please tell me you have backups.)
What’s Actually Happening vs. What You Think Is Happening
The production issue is real. Your anxiety about your reputation? That’s imagination masquerading as urgency.
Your panic brain says: “Everyone thinks I’m incompetent. I’m going to get fired. I’ll never get another job in this industry.”
The view from above says: “Okay, production is down. Who’s impacted? What’s the rollback plan? What do we need to do to get this back up?”
See the difference? One is spiraling. The other is problem-solving.
Here’s the thing most people don’t talk about: your ego isn’t the problem. Your users’ inability to check out? That’s the problem. Separating these two things, actual user harm from your fear of looking incompetent, is the skill that separates developers who thrive under pressure from those who crumble.
Building the Muscle Before You Need It
You can’t wait until production is on fire to practice this mental shift. That’s like trying to learn to swim while you’re drowning.
I always look at deployments, no matter how simple the change, with the understanding that something can drastically go wrong. Not because I’m paranoid, but because I’m prepared. How do I set up the deployment? What’s the rollback plan? What’s the monitoring look like? What’s the communication plan if things go sideways?
It’s about removing the surprise factor so when shit hits the fan, your brain doesn’t treat it like a five-alarm catastrophe.
Try this: Pick a current problem or deployment you’re working on. Now imagine you’re looking at it from a year from now. How big does it seem? What actually mattered about how you handled it? It probably wasn’t whether you panicked, it was whether you solved it.
Do this weekly. Build that muscle memory. Because when the real crisis hits, you want that zoom-out to be automatic, not something you have to remember to do while your hands are shaking.
What This Actually Looks Like in Practice
Let me tell you about how this plays out in real life. I’ve always looked at troubleshooting as one of those things where you get so locked in that nothing else matters. Once you’ve zoomed out and gained that perspective, you can zoom back in with clarity instead of dread.
You approach the problem with what I call “calm urgency.” You’re moving fast, but you’re not moving in panic. You’re checking logs, reviewing recent changes, verifying assumptions. Your brain isn’t wasting cycles on “what if I get fired” because you’ve already dealt with that noise.
Things break. They will break at the most inopportune times, that’s kind of how it works. But how you respond matters way more than the fact that something broke.
Every senior developer you work with has taken down production at least once. The difference between them and the junior who’s currently freaking out isn’t that they never make mistakes. It’s that they’ve learned to separate the problem from the panic.
The Bigger Picture
This view from above thing, it’s not just about production incidents. It’s about how we approach challenges in general.
We live in an industry that moves fast, where stakes feel high, where impostor syndrome is practically a job requirement. It’s easy to catastrophize. It’s easy to treat every bug like it’s a referendum on your competence.
But you’re not building life-saving medical equipment (unless you are, in which case, maybe panic a little). You’re solving problems. Some are small. Some are big. All of them are solvable.
The view from above doesn’t dismiss your problems. It gives you the space to solve them without drowning in self-inflicted drama.
So next time production goes down and your heart starts racing, remember: zoom out, see the real stakes, then zoom back in and fix the damn thing. Your future self will thank you.
Quote of the Day:
“It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.” - Epictetus
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