On the Importance of Telling Your Friends to fsck.ofs

The stereotype of 'the' grumpy Operator-from-Hell is probably as old as the Internet. Still, arguably, system and network engineers have a tendency of 'being right'; Which often makes them grumpy, especially when management yet-again does the wrong thing.

Most operators know at least one person that used to be young and enthusiastic, pushing [$NEW_TECH] into an organization, slowly advancing to become the utmost expert on it. They made the right call, at the right time.
Then they start to fend off attempts to replace or improve [$NO_LONGER_REALLY_NEW_TECH], also becoming irreplaceable by fighting the fires caused by said technology. Then, with the bus factor converging to 1, they converge to burn out. While burning out they will drag down the team, and discourage junior operators on their journey.

In this talk, we revisit this pattern; We take a look at why people seem to always be right, what negative impact it has, and what it takes to accept being wrong. As one usually does not know when they stand in that corner, we also provide a How To guide for the most important thing: Telling our friends to fsck.ofs (when it is necessary).