I've had good experiences with Uber. I know others don't, but I have. I used to use Lyft but they treated me like shit so now I don't. If Uber starts treating me like shit I'm going back to taxis. If taxis treat me like shit I'll take the bus, walk, buy a car, or any of the dozens of other ways to get around, even if impractical. The market is only captive because people are lazy and weak willed.
I believe that too is as the author wrote – like a disheartening number of things in the tech industry, there are no real standards around what on-call responsibilities look like. Each organization is free to set things up in whichever way suits their tastes, and the resulting practices vary widely as a result.
> 2.3 SDE could do that, but i don't get 6. a 24/7 operation needs 2FTE and 1 PTE per shift, and there are three shifts.
having the team constantly on call is a recipe for having them quit. sure, you could run this with the bare minimum number of engineers, but your turnover would be so high and given how high hiring costs tend to be, this is a net negative
> so maybe all that "busywork" takes 6 full times?
ktlo in a constantly changing company is not easy. software / host patching to maintain compliance is necessary busywork that requires a bit of babysitting. not to mention keeping up with required migrations to new stuff due to internal deprecations.
File access for apps is gated behind “special” folder access (like Documents/Downloads/etc, and “full disk access” which is anywhere beyond the common user directories)
My team has a meeting to hand off the on-call to the next person, and we discuss all pages we got during the week. Primarily two things: whether the page was for a good reason or not (good: our on-call person had an something actionable to fix. bad: non-actionable pages, pages because someone else's system was broken, false alarms, etc), and also whether there is something we can do so we never get paged for this again. I find it very effective at reducing pages.
Lol yeah. My old team had oncall pages in the middle of the night pretty often where nothing was actually the matter. My manager was only nominally on call. In the handoff meetings every week he was basically just like “that sucks”.
A "tell" in this case is domain-specific terminology to denote a behavior that provides information that the person may have been trying to keep secret. I believe the term comes from poker:
non competes are not enforceable in california and a few other US states iirc, although if there were to ever be an IP lawsuit, it would be a war of attrition (with odds highly stacked against the engineer)
Amazon does this a lot in their “customer obsession” management strategy. In their terms, the mechanism to make this happen is called a “PR/FAQ”[1], and the core idea is that if you can’t express your idea in terms of a customer-focused press release, then it isn’t a good thing to add.
