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Comment by warbeforepeace | Hacker News Reader

I work for FAANG and have had one page outside of working hours over that last 12 months. I do not respond to emails on weekends or evenings. I do not turn my work laptop on during vacation at all. I leave at home in a safe.

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Totally different experience here working for FAANG, at least as it pertains to pages. For emails / slack etc I found it easy to ignore while working as an engineer, but much harder now in a management role. Even entirely disconnecting when going on vacation can be tough.

That said it is mostly self imposed. Over the past 2 years it was rarely the expectation to work outside regular hours (but did happen).

> it is mostly self impose

This is the key. Of course companies don’t object to you working extra hours. You shouldn’t do it - it sets a bad precedent for those who you manage.

The hard part of disconnecting as a manager is feeling like the team is blocked on you when you're not there. If you're a good manager then you enable the team to function without you. It's just tough to get that level of confidence in your management abilities.

I envy you. I've been on-call numerous times just this month and got paged almost daily, many of them between 10pm and 6am, 2am on average. Our on-call duty is basically house arrest for a week. The worst part is 90% of the pages are not real issues or I can't even do anything about them other than wait for them to self-resolve. It drives me insane and because it's FAANG, it's nearly impossible to get this changed. If I could find another job (and I'm trying!), I would bail in an instant.

That on-call doesn't sound healthy at all. Have you tried improving it? You have a strong case for it - such a noisy on-call will miss real issues.

My old company we had rotating on call shifts that was about one week a month. I got paged an average of 2 times a night because of some random thing breaking or some error. My current company, we get a week on call about every month and a half, either primary or secondary. But I have been paged I think 2 times in 3 years. Its a world of difference having a stable application and well done page rules.

Average of twice a night is freaking insane. I was burning out doing 1-week-in-3 with pages 3 nights out of 7. These were all actionable issues (DDoS, packet loss etc.) so I had to actually wake up and work.

>I work for FAANG and have had one page

literally a page? with a pager?

Usually via a Pager app these days, not a physical device.

I have a literal pager because my company wants to take over my phone with their software and have the ability to wipe it out any time they wish. No thanks, kiss my ass. They will not provide a work phone either. An actual pager was the only alternative.

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