Postmortem
The written review a team produces after an incident: what broke, why, and what will prevent a repeat.
What it tells you about a developer
A candidate who has written postmortems has practiced turning a bad day into institutional learning. A postmortem they authored shows how they think about cause, prevention, and communication under pressure, in a way few other artifacts surface.
After restoring service, mature teams write a postmortem. It reconstructs the timeline, names the root cause, and lists concrete follow-up work. The blameless convention matters: the document looks for causes in the system and the process, so engineers can report honestly. Many companies publish theirs, and public postmortems are some of the best reading on how real systems fail.