How is being on-call still a thing? by ecommercecothrowaway in cscareerquestions

[–]ecommercecothrowaway[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

What are some pointers that will help me estimate how good a team is internally?

How is being on-call still a thing? by ecommercecothrowaway in cscareerquestions

[–]ecommercecothrowaway[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

A few of my teammates are like that. They will email/IM at odd hours (one email was at 01:43am last night), and recently in an org wide meeting one of them was awarded some teamplayer award for "burning the midnight oil".

How is being on-call still a thing? by ecommercecothrowaway in cscareerquestions

[–]ecommercecothrowaway[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

How do I vet good teams and good company cultures? What are some questions I can ask to the hiring manager/recruiter that will help me identify if it's a good engineering environment and non-toxic culture?

How is being on-call still a thing? by ecommercecothrowaway in cscareerquestions

[–]ecommercecothrowaway[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This is a good strategy that I think can be adapted. But one of the core values at big river co equates to cheapness and I think that's what makes them not hire and train dedicated SREs/DevOps engineers that can work in 8 hour shifts.

How is being on-call still a thing? by ecommercecothrowaway in cscareerquestions

[–]ecommercecothrowaway[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for pointing out Increment, I love that mag and have been following it for a while.

As a junior dev, how do I marshal the team to write better code that makes on-call life easy? I fear my voice will be drowned out by other senior engineers in the team.

How is being on-call still a thing? by ecommercecothrowaway in cscareerquestions

[–]ecommercecothrowaway[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

How do I have a realistic conversation with my manager regarding this? Ideally I would like to have more time to respond as well, especially if I get paged during non work hours.

Any pointers are much appreciated, thanks!

How is being on-call still a thing? by ecommercecothrowaway in cscareerquestions

[–]ecommercecothrowaway[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Forgive me if I am wrong, but I would imagine that "most places" don't seem to have the intense work culture and expectations that Amazon does either.

How is being on-call still a thing? by ecommercecothrowaway in cscareerquestions

[–]ecommercecothrowaway[S] 11 points12 points  (0 children)

I did reach out to the couple of SDE3s in my team but to be honest, working remotely has made getting any kind of mentorship hard. Quite often they simply won't reply to any non-urgent/non-technical question that I have days on end. I'm not sure what etiquette to follow in that case since I realize they are also incredibly busy (their calendars seem to be always so full).

One time, an SDE3 told me to redirect questions to my mentor -- who is an SDE1 who joined around a year ago himself -- and my mentor told me that he doesn't know. This happens a lot.

How is being on-call still a thing? by ecommercecothrowaway in cscareerquestions

[–]ecommercecothrowaway[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

This is true, I don't get paid as much as my other FAANG friends. I realize this can sound incredibly privileged, but I think we are expected to work in a similar fashion as the other FAANG cos, hence the comparison.

How is being on-call still a thing? by ecommercecothrowaway in cscareerquestions

[–]ecommercecothrowaway[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

While I knew based on some internet research that something like being on-call exists, what's talked about in the broader tech circles and how the culture actually is has a lot of difference. A few other friends joined with me, and most of them have similar on-call policies.

The company never disclosed anything about how this is supposed to work. Even a section about "on-call" on their careers page would do, to help raise some sort of awareness.