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After being a SWE for a decade in Europe, I have never heard of anyone in my network who needed to be on-call. Is this a US thing or only for devops? Why would
by ricardobayes 4y ago
After being a SWE for a decade in Europe, I have never heard of anyone in my network who needed to be on-call. Is this a US thing or only for devops?
Why would a software engineer need to be on call ever? That just means the CICD/testing/validation pipeline sucks.
- atemerev 4y agoWell in finance/trading, you need 24/5 or even 24/7 human monitoring. If you don't respond to that alert, you can wake up and see that the system just has lost tens of millions. Core engineers usually take on call duties, as fast diagnostics and response is critical.
- PeterisP 4y agoWhat I have seen in finance/trading is that the required 24/7 monitoring is done by staffing 24/7 in pre-arranged shifts, not having this done by people being on-call while sleeping between their regular 9-5 workdays.
- atemerev 4y agoYes, unless it is a problem that needs to be escalated to a core developer (which can always happen -- thankfully, rarely enough).
- oblio 4y agoIt's not US only. US companies also do it in Europe. And there are plenty of cases where you need to fix something ASAP and the Ops team can't do it.
- Tainnor 4y agoI'm sure there's companies in Europe that have on-call shifts, but I've had several jobs now and the only company that ever asked my team to do on-call outside of regular working hours was a US company and we had to explain to them how German labour laws work (specifically that you have to pay people for being on-call and that there are legally required rest periods).