Breaking Up with On-Call

Edited on March 14th 2025: expand in the "AI" section This article is about why on-call in its current state in big-tech is flawed, or how to properly develop software. Surprisingly, from my experience, smaller companies get this right, whereas big corporations tend to converge to a hand holding solution. tl;dr # Startups cannot afford engineers to baby sit software, big tech does. Wrong incentives in big-tech create a culture of unreliable software development, which leads to decline in software quality and eventually to temporary on-calls that run indefinitely. On-calls are here to stay, not in the current form though. “AI” or ML are already changing the scope of the on-call and the responsibility of the engineer in the loop. Contact me for consultation. A guard tower via Pintrest During my military service, one of the things I disliked the most was guard duty. Sitting in a tower, overlooking an empty field, being woken up in a frenzy from an unintentional drowse by sneezing c ... Read full article.