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Take this on-call rotation and shove it


At some companies, it is expected that certain engineers will serve as part of a formal on-call rotation. On paper, this seems like a reasonable way to ensure the reliability of the product. In practice, it is a miserable burden and you probably won't even get paid for it.

To insure against every possible thing that could ever go wrong, they would have to build a second studio on a separate part of the city’s electric grid, with redundant copies of all the equipment and broadcast content, along with a full crew of understudies ready to take over at a moment’s notice. If the tire pressure light in the Chevrolet Weather Beast comes on, or the studio’s air conditioning fails, or the technical director breaks both their hands and needs somebody to push the buttons on their behalf, it’s Alex’s time to shine. Most systems in most organizations have monitoring in place for this sort of thing, and it is common for an on-call engineer to receive pages due to (e.g.) high disk usage to investigate specifically to avoid a potential SEV in the future.

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