You haven't been in devops 'hell', then! ;-). Has been many years for me, but SSHing into a server with a high load and trying to diagnose = now sounds like training camp to me, hah.
I remember waiting multiple minutes on a production system on more than 1 occasion! =D
It's not as bad as you think. That's essentially how SSH works for instance, every keystroke has to be sent to the server before it shows up.