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Comment by twalla | Hacker News Reader

The flipside to this is that being on call forces developers to care about bugs in their code that cause operational headaches instead of just throwing releases with varying degrees of test coverage over the fence to ops. Funny how certain bugs that languished in the background get priority when the dev responsible for that code's phone is the one that rings at 3am instead of some poor schmuck on the ops team.

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This exactly. If the developers responsible for the problem (and the fix) aren't feeling the pain of being on-call, then nothing will change and the fallout will be left on support/ops (who will usually find a poorly thought out workaround).

Do developers need to be on-call to handle purely ops-related activities (low disk space, high system load, etc)? Absolutely not. Should developers be responsible for their "production-ready" code when it breaks? Definitely.

But the problem is if you assign a rotating duty to your engineering staff, you as an engineer have no direct impact on how often you will be called due to the half-assed work of other developers. It's a rocky road. Do this too much and your staff will leave. I certainly will. Life is too short.

In short, we're all describing poor management issues. Signing up all the developers for Pagerduty is band aid. So is pushing it all onto operations. In both cases, management is making a choice to avoid dealing with something that requires ongoing effort and time.

This works the other direction as well.

Managements risk-taking is essentially guaranteed by free employee overtime.

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