[grouma]

I currently do pager duty (DRI) for a team within Microsoft. Like most teams that have this duty, we cycle a developer each week to have the responsibility to answer any escalations that might occur. The role of this developer is simply to mitigate the issue. Investigations into the root cause and potential preventative items are reserved for work hours.

The amount of escalations obviously varies from week to week. Some weeks I forget that I'm even on call (well that's actually not true as we have to carry a Lumia 1520 - the thing is a fucking brick) while other weeks are absolutely painful (waking up every couple hours in the middle of the night). Thankfully we have enough developers on the team that I'm only on duty every 6 to 7 weeks. What also helps is that my manager has no problem with me sleeping in and showing up late after a long night of escalations. Overall it isn't too bad and in fact sometimes can be fun to solve head scratching issues. Honestly, the worst part of being on call is not being able to make plans that would involve you being far away from a computer. You can turn this into a somewhat positive thing though by being productive at home whether it is cleaning, working on side projects etc.