- Designing and launching a critical, high availability/throughout system. Finding out that it fails to scale in some way you never anticipated. Designing last minute patches and workarounds to prevent the doomsday situation or patches that will mitigate the issue, quietly in the background<p>- Being in crunch mode and just when you think all bases are covered, finding that one problem that will create a buggy end user experience. Now trying to convince directors or some VP to let you or your team patch it, explaining the risk of doing it vs not doing it, working around the red tape and political non sense<p>- Taking down a production service or database. Bonus points if you’re more of a dependency for several other critical systems, and so your wide blast radius takes every one else down with you<p>- Completing a large scale, data migration, while the system is running in production. Bonus points if you do it without an outage or data loss. Extra bonus points if you do cause an outage, and some VP is impacted and sends an escalation email, and now your senior staff engineers, directors, and program management are all shitting their pants on a Saturday and trying to come up with a measured response to the email, what they’re doing to mitigate it now, and what the long term plan will be.<p>- Getting criticism and dealing with criticism professionally and calmly, without lashing out, when you get thrown under the bus for a failure, even though you escalated and made it visible a long while ago, and leadership didn’t give a shit<p>- learning how to deal with shitty people who steal your ideas and present as their own, or cheat you in some other way (not compensating you properly for you contributions), without losing your cool or letting it impact your physical or mental health