| Very team-specific again. There are definitely horror stories of teams that are struggling to hire (because of misinformation like in this thread), yet still have to maintain a service operationally, so have an oncall rotation of 4 people. 25% of your life getting paged? No thank you, not for me. Usually, these get identified, escalated, and some form of help is brought in. But it requires a manager not to be too proud to ask for help. Most coworkers I know do maintain 40-45 hour weeks, and most oncall rotations are 8-10 people so you're oncall ~once every 2 months. COVID has been interesting - some folks went off the deep end and ended up working too much and burnt out. Some found a happy work life balance and realized there are more important things in life than work. That said, if you're a foundational AWS service, and when you go down half the internet goes with you, when there is an issue, it's all hands on deck to try to fix it (up to the CEO level. When there is a public announcement of AWS impairment, the CEO gets updates every 10 mins whatever the time of day. Because of deep deep ownership).
Those don't happen very often (maybe quarterly?) And if you're not on a team on such critical path, things are a lot more relaxed. But the people that are on this critical path think it's worth it because the fulfillment and pride in being on the critical path for so much technology is itself a worthwhile mission. |