Ask HN: Is being on-call becoming mandatory for senior software engineers?

I can see how it’d seem that way. Few years ago a friend who worked marketing referred me to a senior “platform engineer” position in his org. I asked about on-call in the interview, the interviewer filibustered and never really answered the question. I tactfully pressed and made it clear this was an important topic to me in evaluating employers.

They finally relented and explained Seniors had a two week rotation. When it came time to talk about salary I gave them a number about 20% higher than my norm (mind you: the job ad didn’t list a salary, nor a salary range, I was interviewing totally blind about what even the floor was)-effectively, in my mind an extra 10% for every week I was to be ‘on-call’.

Trail went cold, emailed asking for a follow up, recruiter never responded, ghosted. Found out from my friend the following week, when she called and asked “what did you SAY in that interview? They told me you weren’t a good culture fit”

“I asked what the on-call schedule was like”

The way I see it, a bullet was dodged.

Anecdote to put in your tea, if it helps.

I've been a senior dev for quite some time and I was never required to be on call beyond my standard 9-5 hours. I mostly work in enterprise development and, if the systems are critical, there are dedicated teams who're doing the 24/7 support. Furthermore, in the finance sector the developers are not allowed by law to even touch production (to prevent fraud). You could still be theoretically brought into a call to help-troubleshoot, but I've never worked on a system critical enough for that to ever be requested.

I think it's going to get harder if not impossible. My company has never differentiated from junior to staff engineers for on call. The most we were able to do is convince leadership to make the on call rotation one day every month and a half or so per person over a while week twice a year. One week of on call is very disruptive.

Yes, or no, or meaningless question, depending on how you look at it.

I'm in embedded systems, not web programming or internet services or enterprise software. We're not "on call", ever. We don't carry pagers. On the other hand, when there's an issue, I'm available. I once got called in at 9 PM because we found a critical bug two days before we were shipping. That's happened once in eleven years, though. I accept that as part of the job as long as it's rare.

So: Is that "on call". In my mind, no, but you might interpret it differently.

I think you've already heard the confirmation if your suspicion. But perhaps I can introduce another perspective. Just because you are on-call doesn't mean you go on-call.

I was on-call for a year as part of a rotation. The rotation had 7 ppl, so basically 1wk every 2 months. During that time I didn't receive a single page. This is because I picked a team with low on-call load. Perhaps you can introduce this as a filtering criteria?

There are still jobs that don't have mandatory on-call, but definitely seems to be a shrinking pie. You can blamed devops for that! (joking)

Many organizations who run like this have enough staff to rotate in and cover a 24x7x365 availability.

Off-hours / unsocial hours are there for triage until the full staff can come online and address the issues.

Also, the week of your rotation where you "wear the pager" means that you will often have the "on-call" hangover day. Essentially that is a day off of rest as to not exceed the 40/hrs week.

Obviously this differs company to company and country to country.

"As a junior (or even medior) software engineer no one expects you to be on-call..."

I've been on-call as an entry level and midlevel. They usually give you about 6 months after joining a new team before scheduling you at my company.

Short answer: yes.

tldr; answer: having engineers support their own systems encourages them to pay down operational tech debt faster.