Needing a hero in your organization is a warning sign — unless you’re Disney or Marvel of course. However, at any company, it’s a red flag, because it means there are layers of failures — many of them silent and undetected for a long time. I say this while actually being that hero recently at Sidecar Health. We had a legacy ETL pipeline that had been silently failing for 6 months and no one knew. A vendor drops provider data into our SFTP, and we are supposed to ingest it, validate it, and update internal models. This data is customer-facing and valued by our executives, which makes it even harder to reckon with how long it had gone unnoticed. Now I finally know the answer to the age-old question: when a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, it does not make a noise. ...