That's the benefit of working on a small team/startup. Whoever smelt it dealt it kind of situation. Basically, at first at least, whoever's application is erroring is getting a call when it breaks.
It sounds bad, but it encourages everyone to write more fault tolerant code. Way moreso then a random bigcorp with an on call team.
I used to get called all the time because our in house infrastructure would fall over, and my apps would crash.
It didn’t matter how many times I explained my apps couldn’t run without good infra, and that I wasn’t on that team, and that I had no access or authority to do anything… when my apps when down I got called.
Or, to be more specific, you don't like your company's implementation of their idea.
We have the same setup in my org, but we get to define alerts ourselves. All our own alerts are built so that they don't go off if the underlying infra is borked, and only if there's something we can actually do on our level. We are being kept honest because there is a big kerfuffle when an incident is reported by customers first (instead of alerting).
Taking my managed container image registry service as an example.
- The only critical alert that can actually page people is if the blackbox test fails. Every 30 seconds, it downloads a test image and if the contents don't match the expectation, an alert is raised (with some delay).
- Warning alerts are mostly for any errors being returned from background tasks, but these are only monitored during business hours.
i dont see how that is separated from the underlying infra. If the network/server/some dependency goes down, the blackbox test will fail and you'll get paged.
You can test for this. For example, we had routines that were called on repeated HTTP failures that would then get 5 or so of the top US websites. If those fail too, it moves from an application error to an infra one.
Pretty sure your parent poster meant a small overall team. As in, the company is small enough that everyone knows who everyone else is and there’s little to no bureaucracy to reach the right person.
I joined a startup a couple years ago, and got handed a poisoned chalice.
It was a project that was critical to the company, but that was not very reliable, and broke overnight very often, sometimes 3-4 days per week.
I was the 4th dev on it. Everyone else who worked on it before had burned out and quit. The dev before me couldn’t tough it out another 2 weeks and quit before i joined.
Eventually I burned out after a year and quit too. All this to say, that’s great when it works, but when it goes bad it’s real bad hahaha.
That's fine, but I'd be willing to. Always a chance I'm I'm far from a laptop or even signal, but if I'm having a quiet weekend and something comes up, some overtime sounds great.
I understand. Problem is this kind of thing is a race to the bottom.
Because of the silly ways humans work (mostly due to imperfect information), I'd feel obliged and will agree to it, despite not wanting to (concerns I will automatically be perceived as a lesser employee).
A sufficiently large overtime/weekend bonus will prevent that easily. I've had quite a few conversations both internally and with customers that started with "we need that by monday" and went via "we can do that, but it will cost X extra" to "well, i guess wednesday is fine, too." Mandatory weekend work is an extremely rare occurence here, I can count all occurences in the last five years on one hand and still have fingers to spare.
There’s a relevant quote attributed to Bob Carter:
> Poor planning on your part does not necessitate an emergency on mine
Instead of going into an immediate frenzied panic when someone says they need something now, stop and ponder for a minute how it will impact you and them. Only then make a decision.
I remember a friend who was asked for something urgent from a client. They rushed to do it to their own personal detriment and uploaded the result. About a week later, they could see the file had never been downloaded. Turns out the matter wasn’t that urgent and the client had other priorities. My friend was understandably upset, but it was a valuable lesson.
The advantage of framing it in monetary terms is that clients are very used to thinking in monetary terms. It's not a "no, we won't do that", but a "yes with a cost" that they'll very likely reject on their own terms. And it clearly leaves the door open for something that is really really urgent - be it a genuine emergency or just the result of poor planning.
It tends to be an issue with more "vulnerable" workers, ones with less leverage. Shift work, nurses and hospitality.
Margins are ample to cover low wages.
That's true, but that's always true - people with less bargaining power will always have a harder time. Nurses (and other care workers) also suffer from the effect that the people that suffer most from a hard stance on work time are their wards and not their bosses.
Law again takes care of that, because the right to rest also exist. So if you are asked to work 1h during the weekend, you usually gain 2.5 to 3 hours of rest in exchange.
