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We had a team of 3 or 4 developers in a small company with a few shrink-wrapped SW products. We took turns being on call for a week at a time. At first it was s
by zwieback 5y ago
We had a team of 3 or 4 developers in a small company with a few shrink-wrapped SW products. We took turns being on call for a week at a time. At first it was scary but I learned so much, talking directly to end users and discussing their issues definitely made me a better developer. At first we had a "tech support" engineer but it turned out that 90% of the calls had to be escalated anyway so we just switched to developers handling the calls.
At the next job I was also on call for systems we put on a manufacturing line. That was a lot more exciting and involved driving to the plant and try to get things going when production stops. Losing $10000 per hour when the line is stopped wakes you up real fast even if you just jumped out of bed 20 minutes ago.
- Psychlist 5y agoI think what makes those work is being part of a small team. It's not so much that if Bob releases bad code you can go over and punch Bob, as that no-one wants to be responsible for waking their teammates up in the night to start with. Another case of: can be done properly is a good work environment, and can be literal death when done badly.