My boss recently started an on-call rotation for us. None of the code I have written is customer facing. If everything I wrote breaks at 5:01pm on Friday, external customers will feel 0 impact if I wait to fix it until I show up again on Monday. Worst case, someone internal has to wait to work on something they’ve probably been putting off for months anyway. There are other things they can work on. If it was a constant problem, I’d get it, but a rare instance can be forgiven when no outside impact is felt.

I am responsible for my code, but we need to be realistic about the impact. Not all outages are created equal.

I used to work nights watching over the hardware, operating systems, and applications running in it. We’d do upgrades and break/fix stuff. Some things were worth waking someone up for, but a lot of things weren’t. We’d do what we could do fix it on our own, but for a non-prod environment, it could wait until morning if we couldn’t do it on our own. This idea seems to be lost on people now. I get that 100% uptime of 100% of the systems would be nice, but not at the expense of your employees sanity.

I haven’t actually been called yet with the new rotation, but any week I’m on-call I’m a bit on edge. In the past I had some pretty horrible on-call experiences that pushed me close to quitting, which I won’t get into, so I’m preparing for the worst. I worked my ass off to get into a position where I didn’t need to be on-call and put in my time working nights so other people could sleep. Being back on-call feels like a demotion.

It is a demotion.