3 ms·

I don't think it's that uncommon. When I joined my current org we spent much of my second week going through the apps we are responsible for, etc. But a week wa

I don't think it's that uncommon. When I joined my current org we spent much of my second week going through the apps we are responsible for, etc. But a week wasn't nearly enough to learn everything I needed to know about them. I was soon after added to the on-call rotation and received my first incident shortly after. A few weeks later, repeat. Each time I did what I knew and turned to my team to help with the rest - it has worked out fine so far and I learned so much more by getting hands on with failures compared to passively reading code & looking at diagrams. But I work in e-commerce, not life-critical systems of any sort..

midasuni 3y ago
My org is large enough to have a dedicated 24/7 front line team that look after dozens (hundereda) of things. The churn in that team is high that you can’t really give them any significant training on every system. Even a 20 minute video would take weeks to onboard for a system they’ll likely never touch. As far as I’m concerned a run book is there to stop me from being needlessly escalated to at 3am. If there’s a genuine problem then sure, I or another SME need to be contacted. Most of the time there’s a problem it is a reduction in resilience (so no need for out of hours contact), or something out of our control (loss of power in a location, failure of a circuit, in which case the 24 hour team can raise with the appropriate people. I can count on one hand the number of problems worthy of a call out, and that’s in the last 7 years. As such the first entry in my run book is “judging importance”.