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> I mention on-call duty because it is “peculiar” in that the only other profession requiring this kind of responsiveness is doctors, literal lifesavers. When y
by maerF0x0 6y ago
> I mention on-call duty because it is “peculiar” in that the only other profession requiring this kind of responsiveness is doctors, literal lifesavers. When you go on-call for the first time, it’s terrifying and tells you “holy crap, this is serious.”
A key difference is that the oncall engineer is usually able to directly influence the quality and robustness of the systems being watched. Sort of like preventative medicine, but much more direct.
Crappy teams make crappy software that pages often (or not at all if their ops fails to write any meaningful alerts)
- btmiller 6y agoI don't trust an engineer that can't troubleshoot their own software running in production. I think the "you write it, you own it" adage is really smart and raises all tides when engineers are empowered to root cause each issue.
- disgruntledphd2 6y agoI think the second part is super important though, but it's often forgotten. If you work on a buggy-enough system, and don't do the root causing, then you will have incredibly bad on-call experiences.
- johnmaguire2013 6y agoPlus, AWS literally runs life-saving applications. Doctors need AWS online to authenticate and use all sorts of applications.
- grumple 6y agoWell... some of us join teams that have problem software that is going to take a long time to fix, and don't have the manpower for it. And sometimes the alarms are overly sensitive.
- dagav 6y agoCrappy managers stress delivery over quality, and then engineers pay for it when they're oncall. The manager doesn't care how much their team gets paged because they'll be sound asleep while their engineer bangs their head against the wall at 2am, and the manager gets their pat on the head for delivering more projects.