[ymnska]

Thanks!

> Make it clear to your manager this is unacceptable, and you will end up looking for alternate teams/jobs if this goes on

I'm trying to do this in as harmonious way as I possibly can, but I'm a bit worried that getting really contentious about it might have negative repercussions. It's possible that I'd "win" and allowances would be made, but it's also possible I'd end up making some real enemies and/or put on a track out the door.

One hopefully-unusual circumstance here is that most of the rest of my team (and in fact the company) either don't mind the situation much, or at least aren't openly vocal about it, which makes me look like that one nail hanging out that's ready to be slammed back down.

> Quit / change teams, citing oncall as the issue

This is probably the inevitable solution unfortunately, although I will feel bad exiting (making the rotation even smaller) and without having moved anything in the right direction.

> Why are some issues not solvable by engineering? Would simply resetting expectations mitigate the largest issues/waking up at night?

Yeah, agreed. This is the obvious way out if at all possible, but there are many types of alarms where it's fairly difficult. For example: (1) cases where there is a big problem and we get paged essentially as a side effect of one failure causing issues in our part of the system, or (2) catch-all alarms designed to page when something looks suspicious enough to merit human attention, even if not a known failure case. There's a strong attitude of err-on-potential-issues, so relaxing any of these tends to be a no-go politically.

[pluto9]

> I will feel bad exiting (making the rotation even smaller) and without having moved anything in the right direction.

FWIW, I've quit jobs on short notice because of poor conditions like this, and my leaving increased pressure on those who were still there. These are good things to keep in mind:

- They are free to resign too.

- Their predicament is entirely the fault of the employer, not you.

- Employees are often willing to soldier on out of a sense of duty to their coworkers, which gives the employer no incentive to change. To the company, it's a case of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it".

A former employer of mine once had all developers working 60 hour weeks because "this is what it takes to be competitive in the industry". The staff grumbled and complained, but it wasn't until there was a mass exodus of senior developers that they suddenly discovered the value of happy employees. That company is actually quite a nice place to work now. Some executives are incapable of seeing the error of their ways without real consequences.

[ianai]

There will likely always be someone willing to fill any position regardless of how abusive it is. There’s no reason to suffer because other people have decided they’re going to suffer at a miserable job. There’s also generally a huge pool of talent that management could find a way to accept for a position, if they’ve gotten the correct incentives.

[pluto9]

They can definitely find replacements, but they're still hurt by the knowledge that walks out the door with their former employees. My previous employer had a large decade-old (at the time) codebase that was only well understood by people who had been there since the beginning. Losing all those SMEs was a painful blow, which was why they finally changed their policies.

[ianai]

When they have alerts that tightened down and want them responded to that way - I suspect they’re institutionally or personally paranoid. I’ve seen this happen when your department is the object of derision from other departments. Ie when IT is treated as a cost sector. This is a huge red light and a reason to run for the hills. Perhaps the nice option is it’s just your immediate management who’s overreacting and switching teams can make it better. But I file this combination as a grave condition to avoid at all costs

[patrakov]

Get a course on monitoring, so that you can use that to speak with authority and tell others that they are in fact incompetent. Spoiler: case (2) is a big no-no for paging alarms. And "err-on-potential-issues" is a synonym for "crying wolf", which is an antipattern. All paging alerts must be actionable and have a playbook, period, and no exceptions.

[DoofusOfDeath]

> I'm trying to do this in as harmonious way as I possibly can, but I'm a bit worried that getting really contentious about it might have negative repercussions.

You mentioned "contentious". Are you concerned that the conversation can't remain friendly, professional, and cordial for some reason?

[jokethrowaway]

On feeling bad because of exiting: You're giving management one more data point that this situation doesn't make sense.

Engineering manager don't care about complaints you're making while smiling and trying to be nice, they care about employees churn rate.

Hopefully things will change for the good in the future.