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What they're actually doing is conflating programmer and sysadmin here; the tasks they're assigning to the 'on-call programmer' are very similar to the ones I w
by gchpaco 14y ago
What they're actually doing is conflating programmer and sysadmin here; the tasks they're assigning to the 'on-call programmer' are very similar to the ones I would expect as a sysadmin to get. Things like monitor the service, act as first responder, coordinate fixes; there's precious little that is actual programming there until you get into fixing it, and even there the goal is minimizing downtime, not debugging the change into working on the live system; typically "revert whatever changed" is one of the first tools for this work.
An actual need to do programming instantly and with no warning is quite a different proposition, not one that I'm aware of having ever been needed in any of the companies I've worked for.
- sciurus 14y agoIt sounds like they have a dedicated customer support team and the on-call programmers are the second-level support. Take a look at the examples DHH gives of the work on-call programmers do- "We spend time trying to figure out why emails weren’t delivered (often because they get caught in the client’s spam filter or their inbox is over capacity), or why an import of contacts from Excel is broken (because some formatting isn’t right), or any of the myriad of other issues that arises from having variable input and output from an application that’s been used by millions of people."