I was standing outside a conference room watching my team lie to another team about a database outage. It was day four. Through the glass door, I could see the engineer on the call, explaining with impressive confidence that our cloud provider was having issues. Any minute now, they said, the vendor would resolve it and services would come back up. I pulled up the provider’s status page. Green across the board.

Well, maybe not everything. Look, being a goalie is objectively ridiculous. You strap on forty pounds of equipment designed to protect you from frozen rubber traveling at speeds that would make physicists frown. Then you stand in front of a net and dare people to shoot at you. It’s a strange job. But here’s the thing: being a goalie is basically the same job as running ops, or security, or honestly, any part of software development where you’re the one who has to keep the thing from breaking.