Has anyone worked at places that measure responders on 15-minute SEV1 containment and a same-day timeline write-up, not just ‘firefighting’? I’m considering a move and want signals in interviews that runbooks, AARs within 24 hours, and tooling like PagerDuty+Jira timelines are standard — what questions or tells have helped you confirm that?
What’s worked for me is asking them to ‘pull up the last SEV1 in PagerDuty and its Jira postmortem’ and narrate who was IC/scribe and when containment was declared — if they can show timestamps in one view, they live it; if not, it’s theater… Small caveat: some teams track time‑to‑mitigation SLOs instead of a hard 15‑minute rule, which can be healthier; is that in your acceptable range?
In interviews, I ask for 10 minutes with the current on-call IC to screen-share the last SEV1’s Slack/PagerDuty thread and the Jira draft, and I look for a named scribe, a timestamped “containment declared,” and a same-day postmortem stub. Redactions are fine, but if they say “we can’t share incidents” or can’t say who owns closing the write-up by EOD, that’s a tell — would you be comfortable asking for that, @OP?
Quick check I use: ask them to open Jira Automation and show the rule that creates an ‘AAR within 24 hours’ task, assigns owners, and escalates if it slips; then flip to PagerDuty to show a Response Play that triggers within 15 minutes. If they hand-wave or say it’s manual, — that’s a yellow flag. Reference if you need it: Incident Workflows — would you be comfortable pushing for that in an onsite?
Building on @amelia_jones57, ask to see their incident “definition of done” and a dashboard with MTTA and AAR-on-time rates; if they can’t show a redacted view, that’s a smell. If the template lives only “in Slack,” it probably doesn’t exist — do they also run monthly game days and have a named scribe rotation?