Not oncall for Amazon but I don't particularly mind it. It sucks to have to be near a computer for the time, but I actually find digging in and finding that needle in a haystack pretty fun. On a good team, the life interruption is minimal.

As much as I like digging,debugging and learning that comes with it, fixing things under tremendous time pressure wears me out :(

When I was on-call for a big project, I jumped every time my phone rang. It wasn't a good experience at all.

"We are at the fair, I have 18 customers lined up but I can't take orders. Can you fix this now or should I start taking them on paper?"

You know the joke that atheists don't believe in god until the plane nosedives? That was the moment for me :)

"Oh, I... I need to see the error message before I can say anything. We don't have any errors logged. Hmm... Would you allow me to remote into your device?"

"Can't do that. We lost the internet connection here, sorry."

Ugh.

How long have you been on call for and how many 3am wakeup calls have you had? I used to think these same. Protip: you won't always be on a good team.

I'm in Asia and always thought I'd make a great on call person for those of you who haven't jumped ship. I should apply somewhere.

Hah. I'm genuinely surprised this isn't more of a thing.

We reduced the stress of on-call by introducing processes that supported creativity and reduced panic:

https://zwischenzugs.com/2017/04/04/things-i-learned-managin...

I prefer to be oncall as long as I'm empowered to prioritize software improvements that reduce ops burden and improve customer experience.