| ▲ | convolvatron 3 days ago |
| on call is like hiring civil and structural engineers to build you a bridge over a canyon, and then when they show up to do a site inspection you just push them in. eventually maybe you'll be able to cross. |
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| ▲ | stackskipton 3 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| As SRE, strongly disagree. On Call is like hiring civil and structural engineers then holding them responsible when their poor bridge collapses under the weight of all the traffic. Sometimes, yes, Devs get called out for stuff outside their control like infrastructure failing. However, at my job, we just had two devs that quit over on call and guess what, their service was one of worst offenders in "Opps, we pushed bug to production." |
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| ▲ | convolvatron 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | firstly, on call means supporting the entire service. not something in general I built. secondly, many if not most of the issues that arise are part of some infrastructure automation or third party service or database. expecting me to be fluent in all of those to be useful in the hot seat is a pretty substantial investment and qualifies me to be an SRE on top of my other duties thirdly, one major reason why my code might fail in production is that it wasn't sufficiently tested, probably because the service as a whole is basically untestable, and even if it were, building test and test infrastructure is likely not at all valued. in many places just filling in that hole would take a year. onto to the fourth, the story is supposed to be that by operating the service, I'll be incentivized to fix automation and come up with solutions to make it more robust. I actually know how to do this, and every week I'm on call is time that I _dont_ spend doing this. furthermore, getting permission to do so is often like pulling teeth. sounds complicated. sure that would be nice, look at that when you have time in the indefinite future. so what this often looks like from a development perspective is that I'm being paid to be a developer, I was judged based on my ability to be a developer, but at the end of the day I'm not building the service. I _am_ the service. | | |
| ▲ | stackskipton 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | If you are on call for infrastructure, then I could understand not wanting to be on call. If I'm there, I'm on call for infrastructure as SRE. I get all political reasons that your code may not work. However, refusing to be on call doesn't fix any of those reasons, it's just ignoring work. Flip side as SRE, I ask if Devs are on call. If they are not, I don't take the job because there is zero incentive for them to fix anything vs churn out 5 features, chuck it over the fence and be like "Ops problem now" | | | |
| ▲ | CoffeeOnWrite 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > but at the end of the day I'm not building the service. I _am_ the service. I agree. For me though, it gives me pride to own my services and be fully accountable to the business, especially as part of a team with whom I build comradery, and of course our value to the business justifies our good compensation. It only works because we are empowered to make decisions that keep our on calls sustainable. |
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| ▲ | badgersnake 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Give them the time and budget to build it like a bridge then. Oh wait, your competitors beat you to market by several years. Making people work 24/7 is not conducive to good anything, thus on call is a terrible way to do things. | | |
| ▲ | stackskipton 2 days ago | parent [-] | | On call shouldn't have 24/7 responsibilities. For example, I'm on call and took a call this morning due to MySQL Server running out of space. Terraform change later, it's no longer out of space and I'm back to my day. I'll take 30 minutes it took me to resolve out of my normal time elsewhere. If on call balloons your 40 hours to 70 hours, yes, you have an issue. That's not normal and you should consider changing jobs. | | |
| ▲ | Retric 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Waking someone up is going to cost far more than the time spent fixing the issue. | | |
| ▲ | stackskipton 2 days ago | parent [-] | | I wasn’t woken up. If someone is woken up, it’s expected they take more time off. |
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| ▲ | badgersnake 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | If you are expected to carry your laptop and answer the phone you are working. Whether you get paged or not is irrelevant. The corporate gaslighting is strong with this one. | |
| ▲ | bdangubic 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | you should be looking for another job… immediately… terraforming on YOUR time is no way to live… |
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| ▲ | acchow 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| In software, building bug-free software is almost never the goal. There is a constant juggling act of tradeoffs between time, requirements, and tech debt. |
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| ▲ | ddingus 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| I love your comment on this. Perfection. Once, while traveling in an RV for some work related marketing thing, the discussion turned to the lack of fuel economy... The RV might perform better if the engine powered the RV by blowing fuel right out the tail pipe. Horrible efficiency, terrible for the planet, and, and all the negatives packed right into a quick expression. Your comment is on point. Solid and I just felt like sharing my appreciation for the morbid fun it contains. Nice work. Worth a healthy chuckle. Thanks. |
