they don't. I mean for example Amazon puts all new hires on "on call" status for like a week every month. the LAST people I would want working On Call and waking up at 2am to try and solve something are fresh grad hires. You can actually watch videos on youtube of new grad amazon hires doing this, they actually document themselves, and the vast majority of them are "well it's 1am and I just got a call...I'm going to try and fix this ticket but really I have no idea what I'm doing" annnnnd generally nothing gets fixed or they break it worse. So they end up being sleep deprived, going into the office the next day and sleeping at whatever workstation they can find available and it leaves you wondering "what's the point?"

I personally am of the belief that being on call for stuff like this is pointless when you're world wide and could literally just transition the stuff to a different team in some other part of the world but I guess Amazon treats it as a sort of initiation process or whatever.

[–] zwerg@feddit.org 73 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

Its not an initiation, it's hazing

[–] tomiant@piefed.social 16 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago)

I wonder if you're actually right. I've held positions I had no business holding. Ended up having to escalate half across the world anyway. But sure got my feet wet. Don't know how much the company lost. Sorry, companies.

[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 7 points 12 hours ago

Amazon puts all new hires on "on call" status for like a week every month

That's insane. Where I worked you had to spend about 6 months learning enough that they trusted you to be on call. For months you'd just learn the systems. When you and your team agreed you were probably ready to be on-call, you'd be the "shadow" on call. The primary would get paged and you'd get paged too. You wouldn't actually do anything, but you'd watch while the primary tried to solve the problem and take notes. If that went well it would switch to reverse-shadow. Then you were on call but there was an experienced person who was paged and ready to step in if you needed help. Only if that went well could you proceed to full solo on-call status.

being on call for stuff like this is pointless when you're world wide and could literally just transition the stuff to a different team in some other part of the world

Where I worked there were 2 teams in 2 different time zones. But, you still were up late or early at times because there's no perfectly-opposite time zone where team B is exactly 12 hours behind team A throughout the full year.

Also, if you recorded yourself doing on-call activities on YouTube or TikTok or something, you'd be fired. It would be the same thing as speaking to the press without authorization.

[–] tomiant@piefed.social 3 points 20 hours ago

"You are saying you are superfluous to the organization, gotcha."

[–] CompactFlax@discuss.tchncs.de 42 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Technical people don’t understand the business, you see.

[–] uncouple9831@lemmy.zip 26 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

You fuck over poor people for money, it's not complicated

[–] tomiant@piefed.social 12 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

As long as I fuck over more people than fuck me over, I'm ahead.

[–] uncouple9831@lemmy.zip 20 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

Ah, a republican!

[–] tomiant@piefed.social 10 points 19 hours ago

Zero Sum Party 4 Lyfe.

[–] chocrates@piefed.world 4 points 18 hours ago

Not untrue. I don't understand or give a fuck about the business side. Same goes for my business colleagues about software.

How do "real" engineers handle this shit? I feel like IT shouldn't have to reinvent it