As a contractor who is on an oncall schedule. I have never worked in a company that treats oncall as a very serious business. I only worked in 2 companies that need oncall so I’m biased. On paper, they both say it is serious and all SLA stuffs were setup, but in reality there is not enough support.

The problem is, oncall is a full-time business. It takes full attention of the oncall engineer, whether there is an issue or not. Both companies simply treat oncall as a by-product. We just had to do it so let’s stuff it into the sprint. The first company was slightly more serious as we were asked to put up a 2-3 point oncall task in JIRA. The second one doesn’t even do this.

Neither company really encourages engineers to read through complex code written by others, even if we do oncall for those products. Again, the first company did better, and we were supposed to create a channel and pull people in, so it’s OKish to not know anything about the code. The second company simply leaves oncall to do whatever they can. Neither company allocates enough time for engineers to read the source code thoroughly. And neither has good documentation for oncall.

I don’t know the culture of AWS. I’d very much want to work in an oncall environment that is serious and encourages learning.