My quick guide to pager duty.
Step 1: Find a new job.
There are way too many opportunities out there to subject yourself to this nonsense. Pager duty is essentially wage theft.
Step 1: Find a new job.
There are way too many opportunities out there to subject yourself to this nonsense. Pager duty is essentially wage theft.
(I'm a software engineer at google who is oncall at this moment)
[0] https://goshippo.com/blog/evolution-our-pagerduty-playbook-f...
Google is a big company. I expect them to 1) Have people in all timezone so that there is no night shift 2) Have many people on rotation so each individual is rarely on shift.
That's not comparable to smaller companies.
The thing is, there is basically a waiting list to join the rotation. Compensation is nice for those that are motivated by it. But it also exposes you to a lot of the infrastructure that you normally don't deal with (so it's a great way to learn).
We have a higher-up-the-stack SRE team that does 12-hour shifts so it's not as bad for them. They handle the larger scale issues that are beyond job specific issues (ex: datacenter issues).
I can understand this sucking if you are on a small engineering team where you can't do things like this (I've got friends at companies that employ < 10 developers, I've heard the stories). I guess I wasn't thinking about it for smaller eng teams where the number of people available to support the product isn't there.
If it's unimportant enough that the company can't afford to pay you a large multiple of your normal salary to work on it out-of-hours, it's unimportant enough that it can wait until you're next in the office.
Many, many, many industries have overnight staff to handle these issues, but likely because software engineers tend to be young, lack a union and are paid salary with no overtime compensation, it is somehow acceptable in this industry. Which is why I honestly asked that question. Why do you and the above poster, find it so normal to be on pager duty when so many other industries, often with much more critical services, do not require it?
False premise. Many jobs require it, including low paid ones across many industries. Many of my jobs which were not in IT required it sometimes (like working at a golf course and being called out for a jammed golf cart garage door in one case - which I clocked hours for btw).
If it's part of your job description and the salary you get covers it then I'm not seeing why you should "find a different job."
They also pay significant overtime multipliers when they do have to call somebody in outside of their scheduled hours.
Two reasons:
1. Your salary doesn't cover night and weekend pages in most first world countries regarding labor law (the US is backwards in this regard, but luckily the economy does well enough at the moment jobs are a plenty).
2. Quality of life. If your job requires on call rotation, interrupting your off-work hours or your sleep, and you're not getting paid enough (<$100K/year), immediately start seeking out another job. It's a sellers market.
That has nothing to do with this article, though.
Ideally, there would be a financial incentive to fix production bugs so businesses aren't waking up developers. This isn't true when you have exempt employees (US term for no paid overtime) doing your support. I've seen manager go totally friggin stupid with employees who went above and beyond[2].
I still think some managers think we would "code ourselves a mini van"[1] if they paid us for support.
Right, so what's the problem? The original article isn't talking about putting people who aren't paid for pager duty on pager duty. The OP is whining about the mere idea of it and suggesting that if you have that job you should quit.
If you can fix the problem at 3am without thinking, then so can a computer program. Write that computer program.
Classy. This comment is 100% exactly the attitude. This is why Step 1 is to find a new job. This poster is punishing you like a parent would a child. Is this the way you want to be looked at and treated? Did you study as hard as you did and spent so much time developing your craft for this?
There are better opportunities out there. 1,000s of them. Avoid the jrockways of the world and you will have a much happier career and life.
Grandparent post described a way to create incentive. He posited that without it there wasn't incentive, he did not prove - nor even attempt to argue - that it was the only (or best) way to create incentive.
ability to respond quickly to outages
Depending on the nature of a problem and training of the people involved, there is zero reason to assume the programmer of an application is more qualified to triage and remedy an outage than someone specializing in operations. The problem could be in the infrastructure around the app. Even if the underlying problem is something the developer is well suited to fix, they still might not be have the expertise to deliver the best temporary solution to get online ASAP, and stay there until the real fix can be landed in the codebase.
To conclude, parent poster does not need to waste breath articulating why such obviously fallacious reasoning is bullshit.
That's why we've got AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and so on, right? The programmer gets to deal with only their code and let someone else worry about the rest of the infrastructure.
My problem is there is no incentive for a company to fix the software if they aren't staffed for support. Also, I see a lot of DevOps people thinking they are the only ones who can fix or diagnose the problems. Often, software developers aren't experienced in networks, databases, or hardware. Thinking that devops is the be all of 24 hour support is a problem.
> If you can fix the problem at 3am without thinking, then so can a computer program. Write that computer program.
I've notice a bit of a link from uncompensated support to allowing time adding fixes to the software.
Frankly, from a hit-by-a-bus problem, if no one but the people who wrote the software can support it, then you really have a problem.
In theory, you have a few people that wrote the software. Who is doing code reviews? If everyone on your team dies in some horrible accident, the software is going to be the least of everyone's concerns.
Vacations are a more reasonable concern. Include vacations in your stated SLO. Support staff tends to want to go on vacation at the Usual Times too (Thanksgiving, Christmas, July 4, whatever.)
Why? Mainly because we didn't have "authority" to fix things. That had to come from a PM.
It might also have had something to do with the fact that after Ernst & Young came in to do some IT re-structure consulting, we had the situation where:
Support staff were supposed to be on call rotation for pager duty. PMs were not.
PMs were given company cell phones. Support staff were not.
PMs were given company cars. Support staff were not (note that when I say 'support staff' I don't really mean 'help desk' but programming. And this was a government utility where, rightly or wrongly, nearly everyone had a company car).
Someone observed this. Management's response was that the cars and phones gave the PMs "flexibility". Meanwhile support staff were to take calls on their own phones, and if need be drive in to work at 2am in their personal vehicles. PMs were not to be disturbed out of hours.
A little rant-y, but the underlying point? Companies with poor "pager policies" are likely to be problematic all around.
Sure, one solution is to make developers responsible for support, too. I find it hard to believe that's the best solution.
If I implement a shitty "solution" to a problem and it ends up causing even worse problems then I should be the one to "feel the pain" and it should be my responsibility to fix it/do it over/do it right. Nobody else should suffer because I f--ked up.
This is working well for me, has improved the service for users, and has made our monitoring system much more useful. (Alerts used to be about as accurate as "Main website broken", but are now more like "microservice X is taking >10s to respond".)
Plus the minor incidents that did happen also turned out to be good team moments, everyone would hear that 'you fixed it'. Okay you did reboot-retry on that file server that wasn't responding and everything was fine five minutes later, but a lot of knowledge went into pressing that reboot button and, as far as manager types are concerned, you saved the day. To their non-technical minds that could be voodoo wizardry so they are pleased, feather in cap given.
I also believe that doing some out of hours emergency support is good for one's own education, you are able to think quickly on your feet as it is a heightened urgent situation at hand. Just being placed in this position helps you gain experience of this type of problem solving. Total focus on the task in hand is easily achievable, one is not thinking about lunch or going home and only half focused.
Once you have that experience then find a new job!
You likely understood the consequences of your action too (and if not, you just learned! :P )
It is only reasonable to hold that stance if it goes both ways. If you consider it wage theft to expect you to work on-call hours, then you also must consider it proper work ethic to always work 40 hours a week, never taking an afternoon to... well, do anything. 40 hours, no more, no less. Don't be late in the morning, either.
If that is how you want to work, there are certainly jobs that offer it.
Good luck getting rid of something that keeps it all in the club.
Personally. I'm a free-market type and so I struggle with any moral objection to these internships. But I find it amusing that internships are so popular within institutions (govt, media, big tech) full of people with politics that should find fault with them.
By contrast: when I was the work experience boy at an electrical goods maker, I would have accepted no pay (I needed it for Uni). But they made sure to pay me out of a sense of professionalism.
Same story here. I am truly amazed at the people who talk to me about opportunity and diversity and still have unpaid internships. It is an amazingly effective filter for a certain class of individual.
> By contrast: when I was the work experience boy at an electrical goods maker, I would have accepted no pay (I needed it for Uni). But they made sure to pay me out of a sense of professionalism.
The vocational fields got it right with paid apprenticeships. Shows the value of your work increasing as your skill and knowledge does.