On call is a symptom of poorly run company. It's a great signal that you should run far away from any place that requires it.
Most software isn't as critical as we think, and the software that is, is expensive enough to have a properly sized staff.
On call exists for the same reason game devs are paid shit and open source exists... Software engineers don't value themselves properly and love giving away free labor.
This sounds like a very software-engineery opinion. Not saying that you're wrong, I understand that on-call is not that important in software development. But as a System Administrator I think that on-call is useful, else we wouldn't notice any outages happening during the night and would then only start working on it in the morning.
Plus, we have customers who actually work during the night, be it timezones or specific industries, so we can't just ignore outages outside of our engineers work-times. And if you're selling SLAs to your customers with promised up-times etc. you better be able to detect and fix something ASAP.
Overall I think "On call is a symptom of poorly run company. It's a great signal that you should run far away from any place that requires it." is a bit too harsh of a statement.
IMHO if you want 24/7 monitoring, then you need 24/7 staffing. If you try to offer 24/7 service and sell SLAs without actually having support people working 24/7 shifts and faking it through on-call, that's the sign of a poorly run company who is effectively lying to their customers (by saying you offer 24/7 service when you really don't) and lying to their employees (by saying that they are working a regular-hours job when really they're doing 24+hour work shifts).
> IMHO if you want 24/7 monitoring, then you need 24/7 staffing
I've never worked at a company which had 24/7 staff, I guess that would require international teams.
> If you try to offer 24/7 service and sell SLAs without actually having support people working 24/7 shifts [...] that's the sign of a poorly run company
The reason I almost can't agree with this is, that almost everyone I know who's working in IT Engineering/Administration works in on-call. This includes people working at the federal post, railways, biggest banks, largest grocery stores, national TV/Radio etc. And that's all in Switzerland, so I doubt that these companies are all poorly run.
It's also not really lying to customers, because customers know about on-call. They know that people generally fix stuff during business hours, with on-call people watching out for the systems during non-business hours.
I wonder if it's a cultural difference or something. I rarely hear people complain about on-call. Not many especially like it, but it's considered to be a thing you just have to do. Also, everyone I know gets paid extra for on-call, and it being Switzerland, on-call has lots of rules.
Moving 2/3 of your existing engineering staff to a different shift would raise enormous large communications issues for a company otherwise designed for an aligned workday.
Hiring, say, minimum 4 people to do nothing but waiting for a page would be incredibly wasteful and probably ineffective as they'd have no idea what to do if something went wrong because they didn't work on the system.
It's a weird thing about the software industry only. I've worked for actual engineering companies (meaning: we build things in factories), where having your factory or expensive integration lab be idle for 2/3 of the day plus weekends is not justifiable. People were scheduled in shifts, and they worked those shifts. And although there was a concentration of people working regular day shift hours, there was always a full team on-site (not on-call!) 24/7. If you weren't on-site, you were never expected to be on-call.
Is that really weird? In a factory, time is produced things is money. 3x shifts is 3x things is probably close to 3x, at worst 2x money. In software development we've long learned that with 3x as many developers you're lucky if you can keep the same pace on the project, let alone improve. (It could be 2-3x as many projects, but then you have 2-3x as many operational problems again.)
And then you have companies like HP that outsourced to India, East Asia, and Eastern Europe and then found that they could have 24-hour employment shifts through timezones. Shared integration and testing infrastructure got reused between teams working on different aspects of the same problem. Support requests got handled by whatever team was online when the request came in, and written up and handed off to the next if the clock struck 5pm.
I've been both, currently a developer. My 2 cents. Designers work in the "What we would love to build" space while developers work in the "What can we build" space. Those worlds are incompatible.
Paraphrased comments I've heard in the past month.
"Yes our small margin is always 8px but it didn't look good in this confirmation modal so I changed it, that's no big deal right?" (a designer that doesn't design based on the design system is a joke)
"Here is a link to the figma file ... no not that one, it's the 5th one from the left after you scroll way to the bottom" (I've never told a designer to start up a dev environment and figure out where the code is for whatever feature they are designing, why do I have to open figma and hunt around?)
In fact I was quite careful with my words to use development because I did not feel that park described the situation. The plot is a quarter acre with it's own electrical and water connections that is in fact owned by my parents. I was somewhat circumspect, but I'll just use the actual name of the neighborhood - it is Canyon Lake Mobile Home Estates in Canyon Lake, TX. Up to a few years ago, it was a rural backwater on "the wrong side of the lake" and does not actually feature lake access or much chance of a view. For the last few years (predating the pandemic, but the pandemic seems like an accelerant) it has, like much of Texas, seen significant in-migration, probably exacerbated by its proximity to Austin. All that said, I still find it ridiculous that they don't allow people to live in travel trailers.
i guess what we are all not clear about is what is the difference between a mobile home and a trailer. my guess is mobile home refers to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufactured_housing which are factory assembled buildings that are moved as a whole to their destination where they make a permanent structure because they don't have wheels.
rules like these probably try to influence what kind of people are going to choose to live there.
I think your statement is correct in theory, but when you get into the actual practice of low-income housing, the lines get quite blurry and calling it a "mobile home" sure doesn't help. I'd say I'm more incensed at the idea of being told how to live on property that I putatively own, especially in a state that claims to have great respect for property rights.
oh, totally, things like that would drive me mad. if i am ever going to buy a plot of land then i'd want to do it far away from anyone who can tell me what do do with it (short of forest fire safety and pollution)
Yes, if you can recover 51% of a bill and send it to the treasury they will make you whole. Not a perfect system and obviously can't help if both shred it and light it on fire but there is a recovery mechanism.
Crypto has none, it's a feature to some but a deal breaker for most.
If you don't mind me asking could you share the company, assuming they want frontend or fullstack JS/TS node/react/* engineers with 15 years experience? (email is in bio). I'm about to go through the process and the thought of solving leet code over zoom with fresh grads is keeping me at my current place which I've outgrown.
I love these take homes with discussions/presentations but companies keep insisting on the zoom coding over google docs route.
