[zasz]

Yup, that's how I feel about ever being on-call again. I used to be part of a four-man rotation for a set of services that regularly went down 2-3x times during sleeping hours. This was really rough as a lifelong insomniac. I could never fall back asleep again after being woken up, and was basically a zombie. (And before anyone asks, I've done a sleep study, melatonin, seen a therapist, tried SSRIs, light therapy, intense exercise (biking across America did not help with my insomnia--yeah, biking 8 hours a day, I still couldn't manage to stay asleep longer than six hours any night, now if you don't believe me I'll fucking fight you), Ambien (it takes four Ambien to knock me out), Lunesta (worthless), Remeron (worthless), hot milk (worthless), lavender pillows (worthless).)

Never again.

[mancerayder]

That's funny that you mention sleep issues.

As a guy who was also on-call in rotations for many years (which is why I wrote the rant above), the biggest issue with on-call was waking up and not being able to sleep, even when the problem (eg., disk partition filling up) took 5 minutes to fix. The way I dealt with that was coming in late the next day. Like very late. Sometimes at 2pm, to leave at 6. Even if the problem took 5 minutes to fix, my insomnia cost me 4 hours of sleep, so now the company better pay up.

And I encourage everyone to behave this way.

[zasz]

I did exactly the same thing! I couldn't believe it that my boss was okay with it!

[uxcolumbo]

Have you tried CBD?

https://www.thesleepdoctor.com/2017/08/10/understanding-cbd/

[zasz]

I have tried weed, and I really, really dislike the sensation of being high. Just assume that whatever possible drug intervention is out there, I've already tried.

[TheAceOfHearts]

Not to be pushy on this matter, but have you tried pure CBD pills? Those don't have any THC, so it doesn't get you high.

Although according to Wikipedia [0] it can cause either somnipathy or somnolence, depending on the individual, so it might not be a viable solution anyway. Still, I think if you're passing by California or Colorado it might be worth trying.

I've also struggled with maintaining a proper sleeping schedule for most of my life. The following is just an anecdote, but I've read of enough cases to think that further research should be done on this matter. Around three months back I heard about a carnivore diet and I decided I'd try it out for a month. Although I didn't stick strictly to the diet and added in tiny amounts of carbs (mostly in the form of fruits or vegetables), it had a very positive result on my life. After the month was up my sleeping patterns had drastically improved and I found I was overall much more energetic during the day. Waking up and falling asleep was no longer a struggle. I've been sticking with it since then and have never felt this great. When I cheat on the diet with my favorite meal (ramen), I always end up paying the price by feeling groggy the next day. I don't know if this would work for you, but I think there shouldn't be much harm in trying it out for a month and seeing if it helps improve your quality of life.

I sincerely hope you are able to find a solution that works for you.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannabidiol

[uxcolumbo]

CBD Doesn't get you high, it has no or only trace THC content in it.

[xaranke]

Was there a way to fix the services so that you wouldn't get woken up in the middle of the night?

[zasz]

Not entirely. Some issues were fixable, like moving our RabbitMQ cluster away from RHEL to AWS. But others weren't. There was an upstream service we depended on that went down, that caused a cascading failure. It was the company's core product, a massive Java program running on bare metal that frequently OOM-killed our service, and even though it was the big money-maker, no team owned it, and nobody understood how it worked. I don't remember why our service had to share a host with this monster, but there was a good reason and it just couldn't be worked around.