Stripe – Outage postmortem
I appreciate the post-mortem and, of course, we've all been there.  I have to say, though, that the cause is a little surprising.  That DDL needs to be executed sequentially is pretty basic and known by, I'm sure, everyone in the engineering and operations organizations at Stipe.  It surprises me that an engineering group that is obviously so clever and competent would come up with a process that lost track of the required execution order of two pieces of DDL. If process (like architecture) reflects organization, what does this mean about the organization that came up with this process?  It's not a sloppy exactly.  Is it overly-specialized?  It reminds me of that despair.com poster "Meetings:  none of us is as dumb as all of us" in that a process was invented that makes the group function below the competence level of any given member of the group.