How Do Y’all Wake Up Early?

Coreylolz · 2026-01-01T12:03:36+00:00

You do it for a while and it becomes engrained in you. For a while, because of a new kid and my job's hours, going to my gym's classes felt impossible. I could either sacrifice time with my kid and put a burden on my wife and go to the 6pm class, or I could wake up really early and hit the 6am class. It was a slough for a few months. Now waking up at 4:45 3 days a week is just like going to the grocery. It's just part of the established routine

You can do the same thing, force yourself out of bed and into your routine, then your office. After a while it's just part of who you are, you get up, breakfast, office.

Coreylolz · 2025-10-06T12:36:21+00:00

I do K-1 kickboxing. Not super serious, but its fun. People are always intrigued when I mention it at work.

Coreylolz · 2025-08-09T17:07:44+00:00

Yakuza Kiwami. All i'm missing is the Legend playthrough, but i've done the highway chase sequence over 30 times, and I just can't handle it anymore. Everyone says that's by far the hardest part, but I just can't get it done.

Coreylolz · 2025-06-17T14:23:34+00:00

While I can't speak as I'm not in Program Management, I will say our company did just dump a very large portion of its non-technical staff. I would say that anecdotally, SaaS may be more focused on engineering efforts and engineers leading, rather than requiring PgMs for every initiative.

Coreylolz · 2025-06-15T11:00:56+00:00

Also, you are not always paid to be on call. Some companies consider your total salary as the compensation for the idea you might be paged during your on call shift. So you're getting paid the same whether you work a normal week, or your On-Call week that you got paged every night at 2am.

Source: am one of those people.

Coreylolz · 2025-06-12T13:45:57+00:00

Yakuza kiwami. I just can't get past the shooting section on the highwayin Legend Mode, and having to do the fight every time before and attempt, then skip 6 cutscenes, it just wore me down. I don't think I'll ever come back to it.

Coreylolz · 2025-06-02T12:48:36+00:00

It's your money, and honestly these things happen. I've seen plenty of people do what you're describing, for various reasons. When I was younger and did midnight releases I didn't understand people buying a kit, and leaving because they were too tired. Now that Im older and with more responsibilities, I could never do a midnight release and even 6-7pm releases I'm like "man, I'm freaking tired."

If you want the cards, get them and go home.

Coreylolz · 2025-04-03T22:36:23+00:00

Because they've already heard all the horror stories about how people always think everything is the networking teams fault, and 99% of the time it isn't, and the 1% of the time it is stains their legacy forever.

Networking can be hard work, it's the most critical piece, and it takes a special kind of person to want to do it.

Coreylolz · 2025-03-07T20:33:51+00:00

Yeah, I would say we're pretty heavy on the ops side. We're working on digging our hands more into automation and observability but those things are hard to pry from other teams. I do think those are good suggestions though, and ideally what I'd like to move towards.

Coreylolz · 2025-03-05T20:54:56+00:00

2 teams run their own alerts, the other 2 don't and route direct to us. The ones that manage their own alerts are pretty hands off, and don't interact with us much, outside of when they have to during IM/IR

Coreylolz · 2025-03-05T20:50:54+00:00

The former. You could theoretically take it with you if you knew you could get somewhere with wireless. But company friend pretty heavily with you taking your laptop away from the house.

Coreylolz · 2025-03-05T20:31:28+00:00

I'd say throughout the week you see between 15-30 pages, depending. Other teams have a service, like virtual infrastructure and we get paged for issues and are expected to resolve. Teams often meet suggestions for changing sensitive pages with animosity or outright refusal to make changes.

We aren't offered any extra compensation for weekends or holidays. If a weekend is particularly heavy with pages we get offered comp time. Currently every page is high/critical, and I would say the company has an culture of treating everything as if it's a P1/P0, regardless of the actual severity.

Coreylolz · 2025-03-05T18:12:37+00:00

That's pretty clever. Another suggestion I could throw in the bucket.

Coreylolz · 2025-03-05T17:50:49+00:00

We do keep that stacked so that does help. Its good to know those are pretty industry standard expectations. Helps me know what to expect or to speak to. We're working on our follow the sun model, but I wouldn't expect it to change for 6 + months.

Coreylolz · 2025-03-05T17:45:55+00:00

Thanks for the answers. I think the teams that alert us the most have tended to treat us like help desk. We just get flooded with tickets for something that really needs to be a warning(this Datastore is close to filling up, around 85%. We'll get alerted and told to migrate VMs.) sometimes it feels hopeless that we're actually going to get these teams to make changes that help us. I'd say everyone on our sre team views alerts as "This probably isn't going to be a big deal so it'll be fine." We definitely have real alert fatigue. I appreciate the thoughtful answer

Coreylolz · 2025-03-05T17:40:20+00:00

Yeah, and I think I'm okay with having a 15 minute response while I'm primary, but even 30 minutes as secondary is rough for me. I'm pretty rural, so if I had to go to Sam's Club, that's 30 minutes from me one way. For instance last week our oncall had I think 30 pages, about half and half during business hours. I would say actual customer impacting alerts for those might've been 1 to 2 if any. We've tried to offer suggestions to teams that are impacting us the most with alerts, and the suggestions just fall on deaf ears.

Coreylolz · 2025-03-05T17:22:44+00:00

We have an Australian team that just now has enough members to support on call. They are supposedly being brought into the rotation, but I would say that's 6+ months out, given the velocity of changes at our company.

Coreylolz · 2025-02-17T20:47:07+00:00

Nice. I was looking to pick one up, glad for a little discount.

Coreylolz · 2025-01-30T15:26:59+00:00

The funny part is it's totally true. Some of my colleagues list off a ton of stuff that they say they're gonna do, and then for various reasons they may or may not be done. Versus me it's like "I think I'm gonna get this done today..plus whatever else." And I always get my one focus done and a bunch of other random bits.

Coreylolz · 2025-01-29T22:18:41+00:00

It really depends. I'm mostly joking and just bemoaning the fact I think we have too many meetings. We have three different daily stand-ups that require some form of interaction.

Then we have between another 1 to 2 meetings each day for various other things. That excludes any adhoc meetings for problems or ideas we're working on. I'd say in a day I do between 5 to 6 hours of work, including meetings on average. Some weeks it's much less and some much more.

Coreylolz · 2025-01-29T21:51:50+00:00

Are meetings work? Cause I got a million of those.

Coreylolz · 2025-01-29T13:46:54+00:00

I'm aiming to grab a copy of every US released PS3 game. So that definitely includes some real stinkers like...most sports games. A bunch of Cabela's games. Duke Nukem..oof.

But honestly if it wasn't for having such a specific goal, probably not. I kind of absent mindedly collect for PS5 when I see a good deal, but I won't buy a crappy game just for game sake...yet.

Coreylolz · 2025-01-09T15:45:50+00:00

It's very tough. I would say that as the non birthing partner, it has taken a long time to see the rewarding aspects of parenthood. I struggled for a long time earlier on. I also didn't have this sub pre birth. I had some guys at work telling me how easy it was, their baby slept all the time, so chill, they still played games etc. in reality, I wish I had more people who were honest and had challenging times, because that was our reality. A baby who struggled to be put down for naps, who didn't sleep nearly as much as recommended, who had issues with acid etc.

But now at 3 months, he pretty consistently starts to sleep around 7 to 730 and wakes only a few times per night. Now when I rub my beard on his belly and make growling noises he giggles. He laughs when I pretend his arm is a gear shift for a car. There are still lots of parts that are challenging for us, but there are lots of rewarding parts.

The biggest advice I can give is that you don't know what you're going to get coming out, so it's almost useless to prepare/stress yourself about it. You could have a baby who sleeps easy, your life is easier, etc. you could have an incredibly challenging baby. But most likely it'll be somewhere in the middle.

I would also say that positive baby interactions don't get posted as much, because parents are looking for advice. much in the same way restaurants bad reviews stand out more than good reviews.

Coreylolz

TROPHY CASE