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All these "yeah but imagine this horror scenario" (sorry to pick your example) descriptions sound like badly managed situations. Even in total failure situations like that...the foreman shouldn't be looking over your shoulder. The first step is to take a deep breath, assess the overall situation and get the programmers into their most comfortable mode to fix it. That can very well mean letting them think for 1h before starting doing anything. You can ignore that 100k price tag because that just leads to "just do something" thinking. It's very likely manically hacking away will actually end up making the situation worse and costing more.

Also...these situations can be trained for to certain degrees. There's well established precedents in crisis management. If you write code for a customer with a 100k/h downtime risk you should have done a very thorough risk analysis and have mitigation plans for most scenarios. The unknown unknowns that can happen are obviously the hard cases but you should be able to justify that these are going to be expensive no matter what. But even for these cases bricolage is trainable to a certain degree.

If you know there's 100k/h costs of failure you should also very specifically mention the fact that you are looking for these stress coping skills in the job description (and as such the interviewee should be prepared).



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