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> Then there's knowing at any given second your phone can notify you of an event and you have to put the volume at maximum and place it right next to your face

by piva00 4y ago

> Then there's knowing at any given second your phone can notify you of an event and you have to put the volume at maximum and place it right next to your face every night with an expectation that you could be woken up at any second. And just to pile on that even more: also dreading that you might not wake up if the page/call comes during the heaviest hours of your sleep. It's happened to me, I felt awfully guilty for not waking up after a gruelling work day and some pages early in the evening. I was tired and had been asleep for around 2 hours, didn't wake up and the escalation policy took it up to my manager... I didn't get reprimanded or had any bad consequence from it, still the guilt made me feel like a failure and increased my anxiety when I'm on-call.

registeredcorn 4y ago
>still the guilt made me feel like a failure and increased my anxiety when I'm on-call. I don't know if this will help with your mindset at all, but as someone who's been listed as the secondary if the first responder doesn't answer: I really wouldn't beat yourself up over it. Self-correction is fine, but try not to let it drag you down too far. We have the same worries too. Our worries are usually "Crud. If I don't pick up, then it's either going to (big boss) or the customer is going to be firing off nasty emails in the morning and dragging me into some stupid meeting." The cause of why we're being paged doesn't really come into play. At most, I might just send a text or whatever to the first responder, to make sure that they're okay. "What if they aren't responding because they were in a car accident?" If you have a good manager - and it sounds like you do, since you weren't reprimanded for performing a fundemental human function - then they are probably doing their best to look out for you and your interests. When people talk about "not being the boss" or "working as a team" or whatever, generally what they're trying to get at is that "They have your back". They've been in your position and have probably felt that same crush of emotion and worry that you might deal with. They are meant to be the final filter, in a hierarchy of filters, to protect you from those outside elements which ruin your ability to work effectively. If you put in a sincere effort at your job, you have nothing to feel guilty over. That might be easier said than done, but it really is true. It just might take some time and practice to be able to forgive yourself when you make a mistake. And if you feel like you could be doing a better job at this, or at that, then you just need to permit yourself the time to improve on that thing, and to remind yourself that you are allowed to mess up from time to time. It's about how you learn from those things.
morelisp 4y ago
As someone who is second/third-tier on-call for most of the year: You know what's worse than getting paged when first-tier doesn't handle it? Not getting paged. The only person I ever had to formally reprimand for on-call policy wasn't the one who failed to answer on time, it was the person who, three times, acked and didn't say or do anything else only because they didn't know how to fix it. In all cases I ended up getting pinged by someone else (head of our support team, or a colleague working an odd schedule), after the situation significantly worsened. Higher tiers are there for a reason; don't feel bad if you've used them, only if you're expecting to use them. (On the other hand, feeling guilty for making a mistake is also human, and to some degree something that makes me want such a person on my on-call team. People who feel better when they do a better job will do a better job!)
- pm90 4y ago
  I would humbly suggest that if this person didn’t do anything, either they needed to be better informed of expectations or that your culture needs to change so that they don’t feel the need to ack without actually doing anything.
  - morelisp 4y ago
    This is also good advice. I just wanted to emphasize that if the higher-tier process was never to be used, it rather wouldn't exist.
pm90 4y ago
+1. I am a deep sleeper and Ive missed pages at times that got escalated to the secondary. Nothing major, just something that autoresolved. But the guilt I felt was… incredibly stressful. Because I felt I was letting down people I was familiar with.

by piva00 4y ago

registeredcorn 4y ago

>still the guilt made me feel like a failure and increased my anxiety when I'm on-call. I don't know if this will help with your mindset at all, but as someone who's been listed as the secondary if the first responder doesn't answer: I really wouldn't beat yourself up over it. Self-correction is fine, but try not to let it drag you down too far. We have the same worries too. Our worries are usually "Crud. If I don't pick up, then it's either going to (big boss) or the customer is going to be firing off nasty emails in the morning and dragging me into some stupid meeting." The cause of why we're being paged doesn't really come into play. At most, I might just send a text or whatever to the first responder, to make sure that they're okay. "What if they aren't responding because they were in a car accident?" If you have a good manager - and it sounds like you do, since you weren't reprimanded for performing a fundemental human function - then they are probably doing their best to look out for you and your interests. When people talk about "not being the boss" or "working as a team" or whatever, generally what they're trying to get at is that "They have your back". They've been in your position and have probably felt that same crush of emotion and worry that you might deal with. They are meant to be the final filter, in a hierarchy of filters, to protect you from those outside elements which ruin your ability to work effectively. If you put in a sincere effort at your job, you have nothing to feel guilty over. That might be easier said than done, but it really is true. It just might take some time and practice to be able to forgive yourself when you make a mistake. And if you feel like you could be doing a better job at this, or at that, then you just need to permit yourself the time to improve on that thing, and to remind yourself that you are allowed to mess up from time to time. It's about how you learn from those things.

morelisp 4y ago

As someone who is second/third-tier on-call for most of the year: You know what's worse than getting paged when first-tier doesn't handle it? Not getting paged. The only person I ever had to formally reprimand for on-call policy wasn't the one who failed to answer on time, it was the person who, three times, acked and didn't say or do anything else only because they didn't know how to fix it. In all cases I ended up getting pinged by someone else (head of our support team, or a colleague working an odd schedule), after the situation significantly worsened. Higher tiers are there for a reason; don't feel bad if you've used them, only if you're expecting to use them. (On the other hand, feeling guilty for making a mistake is also human, and to some degree something that makes me want such a person on my on-call team. People who feel better when they do a better job will do a better job!)

pm90 4y ago
I would humbly suggest that if this person didn’t do anything, either they needed to be better informed of expectations or that your culture needs to change so that they don’t feel the need to ack without actually doing anything.
- morelisp 4y ago
  This is also good advice. I just wanted to emphasize that if the higher-tier process was never to be used, it rather wouldn't exist.

pm90 4y ago

+1. I am a deep sleeper and Ive missed pages at times that got escalated to the secondary. Nothing major, just something that autoresolved. But the guilt I felt was… incredibly stressful. Because I felt I was letting down people I was familiar with.