Thread by @mipsytipsy

All this heated talk about on call is certainly revealing the particular pathologies of where those engineers work. Listen:

1) engineering is about building *and maintaining* services
2) on call should not be life-impacting
3) services are *better* when feedback loops are short

if you aren't supporting your own services, your services are qualitatively worse **and** you are pushing the burden of your own fuckups onto other people, who also have lives and sleep schedules.

I get that many of you have had terrible experiences. I'm sorry for that. I'm not trying to drag everyone into the salt mines with me. We shouldn't stand for rotations that truly impact your work/life or sleep quality.

say it with me: **this can and should be fixed**.

and tbh your tools suck.

i've been on teams that were sucked dry by horrible on call experiences. I've also turned them around. I've had people *ask* to be on my on call rotations because they learned so much and were fun and enjoyable. :P

aim higher. don't settle.

and fire any engineer who thinks it's their god-given right to write code, waltz out the door at 5 pm, and let someone else deal with the consequences.

fuck that guy.

Note: I said *truly impact* your life. This doesn’t mean “zero impact”, it just means you can plan and show up for your life as normal during your on call weeks, albeit with laptop in tow.

After reading some DMs, I am reflecting on how fortunate I have been in my career.. I have generally worked for people who cared about my wellbeing, and have had autonomy and the power to change things that suck.

It pains me to realize how unusual this may be. 😕

There’s a lot of super real PTSD and life damage swirling around on call.

I hope you know I am with you; I believe in the uncompromising pursuit of better, sustainable, humane practices. I make sweeping statements, but don’t mean to be hurtful or dismissive to those in pain.

I *do* mean to be hurtful and dismissive to those who use their status to push their share of the software engineering maintenance load onto lower status engineers, instead of putting shoulder to wheel and making it *better*.

Solidarity, man.

Yes, I *know* it isn’t always fun. So what are we going to do about it?

And green field development is what, <1% of what a software engineer does? Time to stop pretending that maintenance and tuning and supporting production aren’t what software engineering is all about.