Members of Technical Staff Are Software Engineers Screwed? with Sam Lambert
Feb 23, 2026
Sam Lambert, engineer and exec at PlanetScale with deep database and reliability chops. He talks about handling major Postgres outages and the pressures of running critical databases. He argues reliability matters more than hype. He breaks down who is most at risk from AI and urges engineers to get curious and sell AI use cases.
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Flood Of Customers After Supabase Outage
- PlanetScale saw a huge inbound migration after Supabase's 3 hour 42 minute outage, with engineers processing ~400 emails and many customers self-migrating.
- Sam says Postgres metrics 'went nuts' and the team barely slept while capitalizing on the flood of real-company migrations.
Why Databases Are Uniquely High Stakes
- Databases are uniquely critical because much of a product's state comes from them and an outage turns interfaces into empty templates.
- Sam explains that database reliability combines uptime and data safety, making it a relentless, stressful engineering responsibility.
Prioritize Reliability Over Hype
- Prioritize reliability above hype when building infrastructure products because customers suffer real business damage when trials fail.
- Sam built PlanetScale around reliability after carrying pagers at GitHub and Meta and seeing consequences firsthand.