Technical Manager Question:

► In your opinion, what is the best way to manage technical operations? What are some techniques to keep systems up all the time, and handle situations gracefully when they're not?
► What are the key parts of a successful post mortem? How to your manage the discussion and make them productive?
► What was your biggest post launch failure/bug? What could you have done to prevent it? How did that change your method/process going forward?
► You are in a design review, and see a major flaw in the design. Has this ever happened? How do you bring it up? What happens if the presenter refuses to listen to your points? How do you make sure that the right system is built?
► What is the process/tools needed to improve software quality? How would you setup a culture that valued software quality?
► What is your opinion on pair programming? Test driven development? Is there ever a time to do these or not do them?
► You have MySQL database in production for one of the applications. There is a new project and the team lead wants to use Postgres instead. How would you advise them? What are the pros and cons or your approach?
► The production system is running on top of Cassandra and it is having issues that seem to be within the db itself. How do you advise the team? How do you manage those issues and the impact to the new development work? How do you communicate this to non-technical people?