Comment by jp57
Comment by jp57 4 days ago
My experience there (15 years ago) was that on-call was terrible because line management was unable or unwilling to invest in fixing root causes of operational issues.
When I started I lucked into a situation where I was one engineer a "team" of two. We didn't have a manager and were reporting to the director of our department. He only had about an hour a week to meet with us. We spent a lot of time fixing broken stuff that we'd inherited (a task that I actually found kind of fun), and soon our ops load started going down. We eventually got another engineer and a manager who was willing to prioritize fixing the root causes of our on-call tickets.
During black-friday-week of my second year there we had essentially no operational issues and spent our time brainstorming future work while we kept an eye our performance dashboards. We got semi-scolded by a senior engineer from a neighboring team because we didn't "seem very busy". Our manager called that a win.
Even back then Amazon had the reputation for being a brutal place to work and for burning out engineers, but I rather liked it. I ultimately left because my wife hated living in Seattle.
> We got semi-scolded by a senior engineer from a neighboring team because we didn't "seem very busy"
What the hell? Hope you told him off, not his job or his business. Weird.