Disruptive Empathy

Disruptive Empathy

Debugging People Requires Empathy, Not Playbooks

Your Troubleshooting Guide is Useless for People

Eric Near's avatar
Eric Near
Aug 26, 2025
∙ Paid

There’s a strange comfort in a production outage.

I know, that sounds insane. But hear me out. The alert screams, the war room spins up, and you’re staring at a burning graph. It’s stressful, sure. But there’s a process. You have a playbook. You check the logs. You look at the latest deployment. You isolate the change that correlates with the failure. It…

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