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by hintymad 1164 days ago
> Even if you only get paged once every few months, you still need to worry about getting paged until your shift is over!

I'm not sure what you mean. A page every few months will be considered world-class achievement in a FAANG-like company. Take Amazon for instance, the oncall is brutal and getting several pagers per day is normal. Other companies may be better, but not one pager per few months better.

1 comments

When you're on-call, you need to be prepared for a page. That means you can't get drunk with your friends, or get on a plane, etc. Being on-call means being ready to answer a page, whether it comes or not.

> A page every few months will be considered world-class achievement in a FAANG-like company.

Except maybe it's a different beast entirely. At amazon, they're constantly pushing new features at most teams. A stable phone company may just be handling pages for when hardware fails. Presumably there's bugs in fast-moving new code more frequently than hardware failure of a tiny org.

Also, fwiw I've been at amazon and had on-call rotations where we didn't get paged monthly. Your manager/team isn't allowing you to allocate resources to fixing your alarms or bugs if you're getting paged that often and not a crazy critical service.

I think all those big corps do a lot of change for the sake of change.

That's why we have so much churn in frameworks, etc.

If you're not "innovating" somewhere, you're not good enough to work there.

Traditional companies are more long term and stable with their tooling and decision making.