Being on-call as a software engineer
What do you think about a company asking you to be on-call when you've joined as a software engineer and not told beforehand that this would be expected of you. What is your experience about being on-call for Saas products and waking up in the middle of the night to look at alerts.
If the on-call rotation is fair and you're only on-call for the things built by your team, it would be overall a net positive. You can learn a fair bit about your team's software, operational excellence practices and sharpen your debugging skills - all of which are decently important. But there's a few more meta things that can be done to make your on-calls an even better learning experience for you.
Don't want to wake up in the middle of the night? Ensure higher quality software is written by you and your team by proposing and influencing better practices.
Had to wake up in the middle of the night? Conduct a post-mortem and bring in process changes to minimise the chances of that happening again.
Had to resolve some issues that have come up time and again but steps aren't very clear? Create a runbook yourself or get the correct people involved who can get it created.
Have trouble deciding the severity and/or impact of an issue? Build better instrumentation to figure out the business impact of any issues
All of the above^ are senior+ level engineering behaviours that would have a great impact on your entire team.
On-call is one of the worst thing for Software Engineer. I switched my company just because of too many on-call.
+1. I think people showing positive of this don’t really go on-call that often due to bigger team size or separate dedicated team as first responders. I was also not made aware of on-call in interview or offer letter. If a serious disruption happens and u are unaware of most of the system while others are sleeping then you’ll be pretty much responsible for this and as a team reputation will take hit.
SlavaRussi
Stealth
a year ago
I think being Oncall is a part of your job by default.
If you have just joined the company, resolving alerts can be the best thing for you. You will learn more this way about the product and the architecture.
You should be fine unless you are being put Oncall very regularly.
