zlacker

I also came to the comments to weigh in on my perception of how rough this was, but instead will ask:

Regarding "exhausting 2-day brute-force grind": is/was this just how you like to get things done, or was there external pressure of the "don't work on anything else" sort? I've never worked at a large company, and lots of descriptions of the way things get done are pretty foreign to me :). I am also used to being able to say "this isn't getting figured out today; probably going to be best if I work on something else for a bit, and sleep on it, too".

>>gertle+(OP)
The fatal error volume was so overwhelming that we didn't have any option but understanding the problem in perfect detail so that we could fix it if the problem was on our side, or avoid it if it was caused by something like our compiler or the browser.

Our team also had a very grindy culture, so "I'm going to put in extra hours focusing exclusively on our top crash" was a pretty normalized behavior. After I left that team (and Google), most of my future teams have been more forgiving on pace for non-outages.

>>jakevo+D
That makes sense. Thanks for the extra info!

>>jakevo+D
Was there an option to roll back Google Docs to an earlier release? Or do shadow release A/B testing for a fraction of users?

(And thanks for the war story!)