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Interesting? Yes. It's probably a good experience to have at least once; just have an exit strategy in place going into it, even if that exit strategy is "quit"
by breckinloggins 12y ago
Interesting? Yes. It's probably a good experience to have at least once; just have an exit strategy in place going into it, even if that exit strategy is "quit".
In my experience it wasn't really the actual notifications and weird work hours that was the problem. The problem was that I was officially the end of the "it's someone else's problem" chain. It's a funny thing about moral hazards and shit rolling downhill: there's always someone at the bottom. If you're on pager duty, you're at the bottom.
So I liked feeling trusted with an important task and I liked ensuring that other people could sleep. But the pager came to represent every wrong thing with everything in the world. I stared at it in revulsion by the end of things. (Yes, I had an actual pager to stare at.)
That's just my personality, though. Your mileage will vary.
- taco_emoji 12y ago> If you're on pager duty, you're at the bottom. This depends on the company. At mine, I (as a dev) might get paged when there's an issue with my website, but I can forward the call on to, say, the web servers team (meaning they get paged) if it's ultimately to do with their config.
- chc 12y agoWhat good does that do if the web servers team aren't on call? I thought the point was to have someone on call to deal with things.
- taco_emoji 12y agoThey are on call. It's a big company with multiple teams, each team has someone on call.
- nadams 12y agoDon't even get me started on this. I worked at a place where I noticed an account getting added to Domain Admins over a holiday. I attempted to call the head infrastructure guy - who didn't pick up. Later I found out the reason why he didn't pick up was because he didn't recognize the number. Granted - I probably could have left a VM and he probably would have called me back...but I would kind of expect him to pick up on a phone that was paid for by the company...
- TheSwordsman 12y agoThe first-responders at my company are considered higher up on the totem pole. They keep the ship afloat, while others get to sleep blissfully ignorant to the latency that's causing replication to shit itself... If there is an issue that another team is responsible for, we open up tickets on that team to address the issue. We take our jobs seriously, and make sure things get taken care of. It's not an easy job, but it's everyone's responsibility. You also need to have the bosses on board to ease the pain of on-call. They need to allow you to come in late, leave early, or take the day off. They also need to be mindful of on-call fatigue and shifting the pager around to mitigate that. Maybe we should stop treating first-responders as the low people on the totem pole, and treat them as everyone else. They keep the wheels running at night, and you may not be getting a paycheck if there wasn't someone there at 4AM to answer the phone.