Unless you're working a startup that's intentionally "doing things that don't scale" (because e.g. you're still yet to get to product-market fit), I can't see h

Unless you're working a startup that's intentionally "doing things that don't scale" (because e.g. you're still yet to get to product-market fit), I can't see how it makes sense for a developer or SRE to get interrupted by "customer chats". As for endless alerts, I've been learning that there are 3 types: • false alerts, which were set up "just in case". The "handling" tends to be "take a look, declare that nothing is wrong after all, mark it solved". Your job is to summarily eliminate these. • "good" alerts that indicate a temporary problem that could/should be handled automatically in an ideal world, but can't be handled automatically as things stand; your job is to move the status quo in the direction of the ideal world, gradually. • all the rest. These are the unavoidable alerts. Usually, the best you can do is to ensure the alert message and related logs provide all the relevant information necessary to handle it. PS: of course, TFA indicates Google has a much more systematic approach, but you probably won't be able to just copy them.