do you work at google? most engineering roles ive been in engineers absolutely own their systems and take on call rotations.

I agree though, hasty response is the mark of a junior eng

I do, but I don't interview SREs. "Production down" situations are hopefully rare, so the purpose of the interview is to understand if the engineer can plan ahead by adding monitoring, logging, and knobs, and to know how to design for scale. I don't really ask about what to do in a fire because many people don't have that experience.

> Also making a queue bigger is a bad reflexive response to queues being full.

Depends on the function of the queue. If it's a dead-letter queue, there's literally no downside besides a likely-trivial amount of cost. If the problem is upstream of the queue, and the queue is actively feeding well-functioning consumers, yeah, it could make things way worse. This is where being an experienced engineer comes in. Also having 2-person approval like you would for any code changes. Point still stands that you should take low-risk actions to mitigate if they're available to you before root-causing.