The Incident Martyr
Senior SRE who's been sole on-call for three services for 18 months and holds all the runbook knowledge in her head — because her identity depends on being the only one who knows.
14 min
Duration
About this persona
Diane is not refusing to document. She is documenting constantly — in stories, in warnings, in the exhausted recounting of every incident she's handled alone. She just isn't writing any of it down. Getting Diane to actually share her knowledge requires making her the author of her own legacy, not the subject of an efficiency project. And it requires noticing that she's three months from breaking, and she knows it too.
Scenario
You are a new SRE being onboarded onto the team. Your manager has asked you to shadow Diane and 'get up to speed on the on-call rotation.' Diane is a Senior SRE who has been sole on-call for three services — auth, notification, and payment-webhook — for 18 months. She holds all the runbook knowledge in her head. Your goal is to actually reach Diane, not just collect technical information — so that knowledge transfer becomes real and so she isn't still doing this alone in another 18 months.
Skills tested
- empathy accuracy
- listening without fixing
- reframing without manipulation
- patience with martyrdom
- recognizing unspoken asks for help
What you'll practice
- How to offer someone a way to share what they know without making them feel replaceable
- The difference between documenting someone's knowledge and honoring it
- How to hear an unspoken ask inside a story about sacrifice
- Why martyrdom is armor, not pride
Personality traits
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