4 ms·

I really wish. But it is the standard. 90% of jobs I see involve building some online service. On call is as part of the job as writing code is.

lostcolony 5y ago
Everywhere I've worked has had on call rotations. Literally everywhere. Nowhere have devs been the first line of support (i.e., not "instead of" per the parent post, but "as well as"), but they've been in the mix. Quite frankly, I wouldn't want to work somewhere that didn't. I have a huge problem with the idea of "my team wrote the code, and now isn't responsible for it". I intentionally optimize against "avoid 2 AM pages", and that ensures I push for enough testing and such to avoid them. If it was "someone else's problem", the only pressure I'd be under is to deliver ASAP, and that's unhealthy.
- wnolens 5y ago
  It all makes sense and I don't have much in the way of an argument against it fundamentally. But it does make this career path rather miserable to me.
  - lostcolony 5y ago
    Well...I also have not worked anywhere that you personally got paged more than maybe once or twice a year, and that any after hour pages led to the expectation you'd take twice that amount of time off the next day, and if it was more than a couple hours, or interrupted your sleep, you'd take the full day off. And those were not FAANG. So I think it's also the culture and expectations, and it's not ludicrously impossible to get. It just requires, getting back to the topic, a reasonable manager who understands the negative effects of getting paged.
dboreham 5y ago
I didn't say you can't put engineers on-call. But if you do that there are labor laws you need to comply with regarding overtime and suchlike. You can't just pay someone a salary then say "oh yeah you need to wear this pager at the weekend". I also acknowledge that failure to comply with labor laws and other regulations is widespread in the US, whether knowingly or though ignorance.
- wnolens 4y ago
  > You can't just pay someone a salary then say "oh yeah you need to wear this pager at the weekend". It seems to be the case in every job I've had. Maybe they ARE adhering to some laws but at the end of the day I get paid a salary, and I have on-call evenings+weekends which I don't select. I can swap shifts, but it's my responsibility to find a substitute. I average 4-5 shifts/months. As far as I know, all of FANGetc is like this. It may be the case that labor laws permit this. Still miserable.

lostcolony 5y ago

Everywhere I've worked has had on call rotations. Literally everywhere. Nowhere have devs been the first line of support (i.e., not "instead of" per the parent post, but "as well as"), but they've been in the mix. Quite frankly, I wouldn't want to work somewhere that didn't. I have a huge problem with the idea of "my team wrote the code, and now isn't responsible for it". I intentionally optimize against "avoid 2 AM pages", and that ensures I push for enough testing and such to avoid them. If it was "someone else's problem", the only pressure I'd be under is to deliver ASAP, and that's unhealthy.

wnolens 5y ago
It all makes sense and I don't have much in the way of an argument against it fundamentally. But it does make this career path rather miserable to me.
- lostcolony 5y ago
  Well...I also have not worked anywhere that you personally got paged more than maybe once or twice a year, and that any after hour pages led to the expectation you'd take twice that amount of time off the next day, and if it was more than a couple hours, or interrupted your sleep, you'd take the full day off. And those were not FAANG. So I think it's also the culture and expectations, and it's not ludicrously impossible to get. It just requires, getting back to the topic, a reasonable manager who understands the negative effects of getting paged.

dboreham 5y ago

I didn't say you can't put engineers on-call. But if you do that there are labor laws you need to comply with regarding overtime and suchlike. You can't just pay someone a salary then say "oh yeah you need to wear this pager at the weekend". I also acknowledge that failure to comply with labor laws and other regulations is widespread in the US, whether knowingly or though ignorance.

wnolens 4y ago
> You can't just pay someone a salary then say "oh yeah you need to wear this pager at the weekend". It seems to be the case in every job I've had. Maybe they ARE adhering to some laws but at the end of the day I get paid a salary, and I have on-call evenings+weekends which I don't select. I can swap shifts, but it's my responsibility to find a substitute. I average 4-5 shifts/months. As far as I know, all of FANGetc is like this. It may be the case that labor laws permit this. Still miserable.