>In the corporate world, you're not ever the only guy on call, so you only get woken up for a week.
oh man. the /worst/ pager I've ever been on, by far, was at a fortune 1000 in the mid to late 2000s.
Yeah, it was only one week out of four (seven days, not five,) and only 12 hours a day. When I heard that during the interview, my response was something like "Twelve hours? I can do that standing on my head"
I mean, the thing you have to understand is that the pages that really hurt are the ones that come when you are tired already, right before you are planning on sleeping... you are most likely to mess things up then, and it interferes with your sleep, which means you are more likely to screw things up the next day. So limiting it to 12 hours is pretty goddamn nice. You have 12 hours that you can sleep, which sounds super easy.
So yeah, I've been on 24x7x365 pager for more of my life than I haven't... but the worst pager I've ever been on was only 12 hours a day for 7 days a month... why?
For most of my career? the pages that actually wake me up have a frequency between once every month or two and twice a week. Sometimes it gets worse, but then you look at what the root causes are, you fix them, and it gets better.
At this place, though? during that 12 hour shift, there was a serious (like 'fix this now or we lose tens of thousands of dollars an hour in revenue serious) issue every 30 minutes. Most of it was not technically difficult, but you had better be fast.
Essentially, you'd work one 84 hour week out of four. And actually work those 84 hours; like literally you had to find someone to cover for you when you had to take a shit; (or you just bring your laptop) it was that bad. (On top of that, then you had your usual architectural responsibilities... but realistically, you didn't get any of that done during pager week, and you were usually pretty useless for the next week or two. This is one of the reasons we didn't have more of it automated.)
so yeah. In corporate land, yeah, you usually get shifts... but if someone fucks it up in corporate land? (In this case, there was... cultural pushback against automating the failures. We were supposed to diagnose hardware problems as we went. Hahah. Yeah right.) things can get really nasty, really fast.
oh man. the /worst/ pager I've ever been on, by far, was at a fortune 1000 in the mid to late 2000s.
Yeah, it was only one week out of four (seven days, not five,) and only 12 hours a day. When I heard that during the interview, my response was something like "Twelve hours? I can do that standing on my head"
I mean, the thing you have to understand is that the pages that really hurt are the ones that come when you are tired already, right before you are planning on sleeping... you are most likely to mess things up then, and it interferes with your sleep, which means you are more likely to screw things up the next day. So limiting it to 12 hours is pretty goddamn nice. You have 12 hours that you can sleep, which sounds super easy.
So yeah, I've been on 24x7x365 pager for more of my life than I haven't... but the worst pager I've ever been on was only 12 hours a day for 7 days a month... why?
For most of my career? the pages that actually wake me up have a frequency between once every month or two and twice a week. Sometimes it gets worse, but then you look at what the root causes are, you fix them, and it gets better.
At this place, though? during that 12 hour shift, there was a serious (like 'fix this now or we lose tens of thousands of dollars an hour in revenue serious) issue every 30 minutes. Most of it was not technically difficult, but you had better be fast.
Essentially, you'd work one 84 hour week out of four. And actually work those 84 hours; like literally you had to find someone to cover for you when you had to take a shit; (or you just bring your laptop) it was that bad. (On top of that, then you had your usual architectural responsibilities... but realistically, you didn't get any of that done during pager week, and you were usually pretty useless for the next week or two. This is one of the reasons we didn't have more of it automated.)
so yeah. In corporate land, yeah, you usually get shifts... but if someone fucks it up in corporate land? (In this case, there was... cultural pushback against automating the failures. We were supposed to diagnose hardware problems as we went. Hahah. Yeah right.) things can get really nasty, really fast.