Some manager signed me up for pager duty against my will | Hacker News Reader

Some manager signed me up for pager duty against my will

4 pointssuddenpagerduty4 comments

I took a new programming job six months ago. The company is growing fast and our group has been very busy. My manager is happy with my work but she recently hired another manager for our group who isn't that good. I've told my manager I would quit if I had to report to him.

Anyways I got an email from Pager Duty saying I'm "going on call" soon for a part of the system I've never worked with. I'm not an SRE and I didn't agree to be on call when I joined this company. The new manager added me to his on call list for a system I know nothing about.

I'd feel different about it if this was something I worked on but thinking about this is stressing me out. I don't know the best way to proceed. I'm tempted to ignore it completely but I know this will come up.

I don't want to have to quit but I don't want this new guy thinking he can sign me up as an SRE along with his other reports.

Anyone have any suggestions?

As an outsider without intimate knowledge any of this could be wrong, but, I’ve been on both sides of the tech and manager relationship and:

- there’s a clear problem in how the news that you’d be signed up has been delivered: they haven’t done it at all and of course that causes you some negative feelings towards the whole thing. So they should have done better.

- he may not know you didn’t agree to it, he may not know you don’t know the system. He may have just been told “roll out this new on call schedule to everyone”.

- if I were you I wouldn’t assume malice, I certainly wouldn’t consider quitting without further discussion. I would arrange to meet your manager that you like and explain the situation - what you’ve been signed up to, why you don’t want to and are stressed. Then from that you may need further discussions with the new manager as well. Either they get you trained up to a comfortable level and feel bad for the terrible delivery, or you find out they don’t care or are pushing you into something you don’t want to do and at that point perhaps you know is time to leave

Good luck

If your manager signed you up for pager duty and it's not considerd one of your job requirements, you should unsign yourself up and also have a chat with said manager (never sign somebody up for pager duty without first having The Talk with them).

You have to push back hard now, or they will continue to take advantage of you. My managers at Google tried to do this and they always ignored the on-call pay bump, so it was easy for me to say "this isn't on-call" and not really do it.

Did you mean it when you said you would quit if you had to work for the person?

If it wasn't just for dramatic effect, why would an organization go out of its way to retain you?

And if it was for dramatic effect, why would an organization go out of its way to retain you?

I mean you believe your manager made an incompetent staffing decision. And have created a problem for your manager.

Good luck.

mail to new manager with its boss in CC and its boss's boss and HR(?)

> hey i've noticed i got signed up to systemX rota without any notice or agreement on my part.

> 1. I don't want to. please remove me. > 2. it's a part of the system that i've never contributed on and don't have any visibility.

or mail to your boss (with new manager in copy?)

> hi, i've noticed that newman signed me up for systemX rota, which i don't have any visibility or knowledge of that system. could you get me removed from there?

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