Your on-call engineer just got paged. Here's what...

The problem nobody wants to admit It's 3:47am. The alert fires. You and two engineers spend 90 minutes triaging a database connection pool exhaustion. The service recovers at 5:11am. By 9am, your Slack has three messages: "Can someone write up the postmortem?" Nobody does. By Friday it's a ticket in the backlog. By next week, it's gone. This isn't a discipline problem. It's a friction problem. Postmortems are painful to write — especially after a night incident where you're running on adrenaline