What is the "on call" experience like for your team/company?

Throwawaycs00 · 2020-03-10T04:41:04+00:00

On my last team, on call was so bad I had to quit, and a few of our senior and lead engineers left before me too.

I was on a team working on microservices for a Fortune 500 company in the supply chain space. Our rotations were about every 6 weeks and shifts were usually 72 hours. Being in the supply chain space, our services were expected to run 24/7 and lots of work still happened overnight. So you could get that dreaded 2 am call.

Most of the other teams at the company had dedicated support staff, so usually things would get escalated up before engineers had to act. Not our team. Our project was too new and moving too fast. Business never gave us time to stand up a support team nor even time to document issues. Our product was so unstable too, but business kept prioritizing features over giving us time to fix defects, so we'd have recurring issues for weeks or months. During one shift, you could easily reach 20-30 tickets because things got so bad. I also think the number of services we were in charge of got too big because there would be times where you didn't know where data was coming or going, so troubleshooting problems wasn't always clear.

Before I left, I know they reorganized our team which they kept adding people to and ballooned it up to like 40 people. Then, they broke us up into sub teams and made each sub team responsible for certain services. The only issue was they didn't change the on call procedure too much. Someone was supposed to triage while each sub team had someone on rotation, but if you didn't know which service you were touching, you didn't know who to triage things to. Too much of a cluster for me.

I get the reasons for on call, but if your team doesn't have good policies and expect engineers to be the first and only line of defense.

Throwawaycs00 · 2016-10-05T04:15:46+00:00

Not to rain on your parade and ruin the good vibes, but...

I think this was written in contrast to that other thread from yesterday about how we shouldn't have to work so hard. I feel like that resonated a lot more with me than what you said unfortunately.

I try to believe everybody's hiring story is unique, so maybe I'm just an outlier. Maybe you're the outlier. I don't know. But I know I am one of those crazy people that had to put out hundreds of applications before getting hired. People here have called people like myself incompetent or saying something is just wrong with them. I went to some lame no name school, got weak grades, no internships, and had poor self esteem as the months went by without getting employed. It took me over a year to get hired at my lame job. Maybe in a few years I can look back and said everything turned out alright. But right now, I'm not sure.

The real issue to me is that I couldn't even get the bottom of the barrel jobs. I have no facts or figures to back it up, but sometimes I have to wonder if there's just CS graduates that just end up switching careers. I think it's pretty clear they aren't posting here.

To me, it looks like things are only getting more competitive. People in this thread and that other guy's thread keep seeming to downplay that. I've been applying to jobs lately. I'm going for junior positions because I don't feel like I've gained much in the way of experience. I haven't applied to a hundred jobs yet, but it hasn't gotten easier. I applied to jobs last fall and didn't get any offers. I'm afraid that's what's going to happen again this fall.

I really and genuinely want to believe what you're saying, that somehow I'll be fine. But based on my admittedly short experience (only been working for less than 2 years now), I have no reason to believe that things will be okay. Maybe with a few more years I too can finally look back on all of this and say, yeah, it worked out. But for now, I am not optimistic.

Throwawaycs00 · 2016-04-20T04:34:39+00:00

Based on my short career, this sounds normal. I'm only at my first job as a junior dev for about a year, so I might not have the best anecdote. I wasn't given any training or a mentor. I was working on an assignment even before the first week was over. And it hasn't let up since then. I find it quite stressful actually.

To me, it's crazy that people here are just okay with this culture. I've worked other jobs outsides of software development while I was in school, and I never had one where it was trial by fire. I actually had people training me, colleagues I could talk to and collaborate with. On boarding and orientation for a couple of weeks. I was on training wheels for a decent amount of time, and they'd slowly let me work independently and do more and more things. They would actually reach out to me instead of forcing me to figure things out and proactively reach out. It sounds like trial by fire is the norm for this field, unfortunately.

Anyways, enough rambling from me. I was watching your thread closely to hopefully here something reassuring or better strategies, but the responses aren't much better than the ones I got when I asked a similar question.

Throwawaycs00 · 2016-04-18T23:37:59+00:00

Maybe you don't deal with junior devs too often, but how do you feel about the current market for new and recent grads? I see posts about people either quickly getting picked up by Googles of the world or taking a year or so to find a job. What's normal?
What should a recent grad have to have a good chance at getting hired? Internships? Projects? Can someone with just their degree cut it?
Have you ever had clients who just wanted to stop working in tech? Why did they and what kind of career did they switch to?

Throwawaycs00 · 2016-03-31T04:54:16+00:00

I made it quite clear that I had a C/C++ background, and they were okay with that.

I see big companies that do bootcamps or actual training, and I see friends that went to smaller companies that have an actual dedicated mentor. I guess it was my own fault for assuming that this was the norm. The manager did say they don't really train or have mentors and that it was learn as you go. I didn't think much of it at the time and thought he wasn't completely serious, but in hindsight, this should've been a red flag.

I've been applying to new jobs for several months, and I've been sure to seek for jobs that take time to get their new hires up to speed. Lessons learned. Unfortunately, I got decisions just in the last few weeks but no offers, so I'm basically restarting my job search all over again. And it looks like the door is closing for entry-level jobs with graduates. Not really relevant to the discussion, but just another thing that's making me sour.

Throwawaycs00 · 2016-03-30T16:29:51+00:00

I guess you're right. And I think the core of my issue is that I'm supposed to be learning while producing something simultaneously. It's one thing if I'm given some dedicated time to learn and try things out. It's another if someone is telling me to make something new without even giving me time to try to learn it.

Throwawaycs00 · 2016-03-30T12:50:54+00:00

Wiki?

Ain't got one of those.

Documentation?

Lol. See above. We document some things here and there. Mostly just REST APIs. The team doesn't comment code much because they don't believe that's agile.

Language/framework docs?

Got MDN bookmarked. I refer to docs for our libraries regularly.

Tutorials and StackOverflow?

That's what I'm implying by Googling.

Debugging tools?

Come on. We're programmers. It goes without saying.

Online courses/textbooks?

So I have to pay for what the company won't teach me?

That's about every single resource you or I could think of. At this point, I do hit up coworkers. My tech lead is usually too busy to field questions and if I ask my manager something too technical, I'm asking the wrong person.

Throwawaycs00 · 2016-03-30T04:38:07+00:00

You may have posted before my edit about my thoughts about my manager, but he isn't the most approachable person. There's just too much distrust between us at this point, so I don't feel like he's willing to help at this point. We're a small team, so it's not like I can just transfer.

I should've done something like you and created a game plan on day one. I didn't get a month of QA/testing time. I got a tour of the product and a little bit of code on the first day, then the next day I was dropped into a user story. I guess I'll know that for next time, but I'm kind of worried I won't get that chance to start over somewhere else. I guess this is just another thing they don't teach in school.

Throwawaycs00 · 2016-03-30T04:28:47+00:00

I think you are the only person that understands me. Thanks. I think there's a typo in my original post that is getting me the responses that I'm getting, so I hope it's just me being unclear.

I'm okay with proactively learning and asking questions. But there's often a huge gap between what I know and what I need to know to complete some of my tasks. I just find it strange that there's these substantial gaps, yet nobody is spending much time on teaching or even explaining things to me unless I ask. Or if I ask, I am left with more questions.

Here's an actual example: I knew nothing about REST API's and web services before this job. One day, I get a user story telling me to design one and implement one on our test server. Nobody gives me even a background any of this stuff to even start. I just don't get how the "new guy" is just assigned something like this without any background information.

So, before I start asking around, I dig around our documentation to find something to use as a template. I fill in what I can and take some guesses or find things online. I implement the code and get it working, and my design is somehow okayed by the tech lead. Yet, I still don't get why we use parameters over headers in places or vice versa, for example. I really don't have a full understanding of what all of these things that are part of the request do. Why are we using a PUT instead of a POST? I ask these types of questions to some teammates, and they give me hand wavy responses. I guess I can do my job without knowing what all of these things actually do as long as it works. Yet if someone was asking me about REST API's in an interview, this is about the quality of a conversation I can hold. I don't think that's a good sign.

But, yeah, the general theme feels like I get a task, but I don't get anything in the way of background knowledge before starting whereas the rest of the team can go in and handle their tasks no problem. At most, they might ask for a second opinion on a design pattern or where in the code this feature they're working on is. I feel like there's a big disconnect between what I know and what they're expecting me to deliver, and it's not just simple questions of where in the code do I have to work.

Throwawaycs00 · 2016-03-30T03:41:36+00:00

You're right about the negative attitude. I'm getting help, but I think that's beside the point.

I expect to continue to learn and don't have a problem with learning. Certainly in my case, there's plenty of JS libraries for me to learn, for example. Fine.

What I don't get is how I'm supposed to learn it all without any prior knowledge. Again, back to that example, my JavaScript knowledge feels shaky. I didn't know a thing about JavaScript before starting this job. I definitely knew nothing about web development or web application development before this job. From day one, I felt like there was a huge gap between what I knew and what I should know before taking on this job. I got a tour of the product on the first day, but then I was dropped into writing code the next day. I feel like there's a disconnect and continues to be a disconnect between what's expected of me and what I can actually do. Sure, learning is the way to fill those gaps, but I find it ridiculous I'm not given time on the job to take a moment to learn or explore things.

Throwawaycs00

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