Who else is working through the 25th this year?
I'm on a hotline, volunteering, for people who might be feeling extra mental stress due to the holidays and might do something they regret. I decided not to risk the travel to see family with the storms and I figured I might as well try to help others who might be dealing with some of the same tough emotions that often plague me this time of year.
I lost a few family members this year and it made me realize all the bs baggage that comes with employment.
Needless to say, I don’t do on call anymore.
The main downside is that I also don't have as many people to escalate / help when an outage does occur over the holidays. But that's not as urgent now that say, generator fires are Amazon's problem not mine.
No deployments revealed how a legacy background processor started losing connections to the message queue and gets stuck in a state where it never reconnects.
Deployments always cycled the pods before the issue manifested.
Machine wise k8s is rock solid and I never need to touch it.
Client wise, will be a few support tickets…
Do you mean additional to their PTO? That's nice, many people feel obliged to take it off for family even if they'd rather do something else with a whole week off and see family on weekends and such.
It's not like anyone gets anything done.
Out of curiosity, what were the circumstances that made this not workable for the remaining 1 of the 6 years?
But awesome enough someone from the support team stepped up and took it for the team so everyone else got the week off! So it’s cool to have a cool team.
For example, our Chinese employees cover Christmas and we cover them during the Lunar New Year.
Best of luck OP and merry Christmas too!
It's pretty quiet at the moment and I'm actually kind of jealous that I'm not facing the kind of excitement you are... I guess I should be careful what I wish for lol.
Merry Christmas all!
I’m on-call ops support for a public safety answering point (a “911 call-center”) this weekend. It’s a regular call rotation and my number was up for this one. It’s usually quiet— except when it isn’t.
I’m gonna go on-site to a Customer’s on-prem server room tomorrow morning and swap out a bad drive in a SAN. I’m pretty happy because I know there’s no chance of a “Hey, while you’re here-” event! Empty offices mean no unexpected questions!
Best to everyone.
On the flip side, I get to spend Christmas helping to make sure that related academic code doesn't succumb to any stereotypes ... :-)
This year - I don’t have a job because I quit and went traveling and moved to Manhattan. Guess my time spending home at work in the Bay Area wasn’t great. Only thing I’m doing today is going to the gym and taking a yoga class and doing legs if I can get some time at the squat rack. Surprisingly busy yesterday (like busier than I’ve seen it almost any other time!) - we’ll see if busy today too.
The good thing about testing browser extensions is that you can do much of it while just surfing the web! Cheers to everyone else who are clocking in during the holidays!
Hope you all have a quiet few days!
Need to spend another 3 months of leetcoding, and system design to "prep" for another set of interviews. Not looking forward for the 12 hr coding days.
My on-call is a bit odd because it's both as OSS maintainer deciding whether I need to coordinate a hotfix release, as well as certain functionality within a managed service (PaaS) enabled by the OSS project. Only the latter thing can actually page me, and I don't anticipate being paged. Fingers crossed!
i am the only one in my role, so i'll be monitoring the rebuild process over the holidays. that said, i don't celebrate christmas anyways, so in a team i'd be the first to volunteer to be on call at this time to allow others to relax, while i'd be taking time off on my own holidays.
Wish there was some way to bond with others that are on-call while being on-call. It’s lonely with the rest of the company being away. I guess this thread is a close as we get.
Best of luck to you and anyone else with generator fires and Happy Holidays to all!
Merry Christmas to all those are on call now.
Luckily thus far the worst was a 06:00 wake up on one Saturday morning.
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Fingers crossed for this year. I'm hopeful, we've done well to improve reliability and coach the junior teams
I’m curious if there’s a community like a Slack channel for sharing this kind of experiences?
I go months between needing to do anything though.