Here I am, five minutes after completing an outage.
For the better part of a year, we’ve been designing our network to fail over automatically in multiple scenarios. If an internet line drops, hundreds of sites instantly shift to the next. If our primary data center fails, another provider takes over.
Tonight we migrated into our plan.
We intentionally failed a WAN link.
Then we intentionally failed our entire primary data center.
A year ago, that would have been unthinkable.
It worked.
Not perfectly — but cleanly.
Routing reconverged. Tunnels re-established. Sessions persisted. Monitoring flickered and went green.
And when it was done, there was nothing.
No flood of tickets.
No panicked messages.
No celebration thread.
Just silence.
A small mistake, a missed dependency, a misconfiguration — any of those could have triggered hundreds of tickets and prevented people from doing their jobs. Instead, everything simply continued.
That’s when it hit me:
In this line of work, silence is the applause.
Early in my career, I craved recognition. Everyone does. Praise feels good. Visibility feels good. You want someone to say, “That was impressive.”
But the more I leaned into this field, the more I realized something uncomfortable — the better you get at it, the less visible your work becomes.
When you plan far enough ahead, nothing breaks.
When you think through the blast radius, nobody notices.
When you fight off low-value distractions to protect the business, there’s no headline.
There’s just… stability.
And stability doesn’t clap.
I’d be lying if I said that doesn’t bother me sometimes.
There are moments — after a long night, after a clean cutover, after months of reducing risk — where you send the final notification and wonder if anyone really understands the weight of what almost could have happened.
It’s easy, in those moments, to drift toward cynicism.
“If no one notices, why push so hard?”
But that’s ego talking.
The reality is this:
The absence of chaos is the product.
No breach.
No outage.
No regulatory issue.
No reputational hit.
That quiet is leadership.
Managing infrastructure and security teams has changed how I define validation.
It’s no longer about reaction emojis or public praise.
It’s about knowing:
- The team is sharp.
- Technical debt is shrinking.
- Risk is trending down.
- The organization can operate freely because the foundation is strong.
Silence isn’t invisibility.
Silence is proof of control.
And when you can find satisfaction in that — when you can operate confidently in the quiet — you realize something important:
You don’t need applause to know the work mattered. Because the silence is the signal.
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