I'll note you're SWE not SRE. I'm talking mostly about dedicated Ops crew on pager.
It's one thing if you're responding to pages resulting from other groups' coding errors or failure-to-build sufficiently robust systems. Another if you're self-servicing.
One of my own "take this job and shove it" moments came after pages started rolling in at 2am, bringing me on-site until 6am. I headed back for sleep, showed up that afternoon and commented on the failure of any of the dev team to answer calls/pages/texts (site falling over, I had exceptionally limited access capabilities and was new on team). Response was shrugs.
Mine was "That wasn't your ass being hauled out of bed. See ya."
The opinions stated here are my own, not necessarily those of Google.
Yes, it is at Google. Our important and high visibility bits have SREs that help monitor our services (SREs actually approached us to take over some bits that were more important).
Google has a lot of oncall people that aren't going to go into a data center (most googlers never see a data center). So there is lots of oncall rotations that still have an SLA that can be handled from their bed if it happens at 2am.
I'll note you're SWE not SRE. I'm talking mostly about dedicated Ops crew on pager.
It's one thing if you're responding to pages resulting from other groups' coding errors or failure-to-build sufficiently robust systems. Another if you're self-servicing.
One of my own "take this job and shove it" moments came after pages started rolling in at 2am, bringing me on-site until 6am. I headed back for sleep, showed up that afternoon and commented on the failure of any of the dev team to answer calls/pages/texts (site falling over, I had exceptionally limited access capabilities and was new on team). Response was shrugs.
Mine was "That wasn't your ass being hauled out of bed. See ya."