Comment by sharken
5 years ago
> If I'm awaken at 2am from being on-call for more than once per quarter, then something is seriously wrong and I will either fix it or quit.
Sometimes fixing the problem will require special access to Production which you don't have, or even a specific role with that extra bit of initiative.
Otherwise i agree 100%.
If you're frequently being paged for stuff you literally can't fix, then the process/monitoring/alerting has broken down somewhere and needs to be fixed. If it can't/won't be fixed, then the company needs to hire ops people whose specific job is to react to and triage system failures -- devs should not be treated as escalation machines. If the process can't be fixed and the company won't hire people to handle the process, then you quit.
Very true. I do ops, I'm on call. Calling a developer at 3.00AM is not something I do lightly, it would have to be insanely critical.
Operation, and on-call staff fixes broken systems just enough, that they will work until 8:00AM when the developer is back at work.
Just this week I talked to a developer, and he asked if I could switch the phone numbers, so issues would get routed to him first. My question: Why? You can't really do much without me being awake as well, so maybe I get the first call, and I call you... IF I need to?
> Sometimes fixing the problem will require special access to Production which you don't have
If it's unfixable, that's when you quit
This is true unless you own a meaningful portion of the company (>1%). To dump your entire investment because of extra hours is not a way to get that asymptotic upside.
Maybe... none of this applies to people who own meaningful portions of the companies they work for.