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by nvarsj 3128 days ago
> is the code going to be fixed at 3 a.m.?

Yes, if it matters. I can think of dozens of examples. E.g. you provide a payment processor, and you have clients worldwide.

At any significant size, it's going to matter if your service is down for 5 hours. Let's take an extreme example - let's say Google search goes down at 3am PST. Do you think the engineer on call is going to wait 5 hours before "triage, priority listing and then fix"? Are you kidding me?

I don't know what bubble you live in, but in the real world and for many businesses, outages out of hours matter. I'm sure some places they don't (like maybe day trading systems).

If you don't want a call out, build your systems to be resilient to failure, and self-healing.

2 comments

You've given an extreme example, not worth replying to really.

> I don't know what bubble you live in

The "bubble" that the vast majority of devs live in where on-call isn't a thing?

> If you don't want a call out

I won't agree to one, nor sign a contract where it's listed.

On the flip side - if your workplace is toxic or bad enough that you aren't allowed to fix systemic issues that cause outages, well then I can see your viewpoint. It's not worth being on call if you can't make things better.