On-callHardoc-p090

Subject Mitigation vs rootcauseLevel Senior–Staff~20 minCommon in Reliability & on-call interviewsIndustries Technology, Software development

Question

An incident calls for rolling back a bad deploy, but the rollback is slow or impossible — a database migration already ran, or the old version is incompatible with the new data. How do you handle it?

What a strong answer looks like

Stop the bleeding first (mitigate), then form hypotheses from real signals. Separate root cause from symptom, communicate status as you go, and close with what prevents a repeat.

Learn the concepts

Diagram & narrate the incident

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Run or narrate your approach, then ask the coach.