The crazy thing is, they think they can just throw manhours at bad planning and somehow make it work.

You can literally plan well, have a good life and still come out ahead of these chaotic organizations that make everybody run in circles out of pure panic.

I have seen this so often in film projects: people believe by exploiting themselves, their crew and their cast they somehow "extract" more value and magically make it work. And that one one the point, relexad, but well-planned project will always achieve better results. Because oh wonder: crews and casts that are not overworked and that use their maximum potential where it matters instead of spreading it out over the whole project will always produce better results.

The thing many dont realize is: If you have a good plan and follow it, you will very often have more freedom to try out new things than when your planning is chaotic or non-existent — because then literally every step is made out of fear, out of panic, to avoid pain or because other decisions froced you into something.

I say this because startups would argue about creativity and all that, but having worked aomw time both in art school and on film sets I can guarantee that the qell prepared always have more freedom than those who just try to figure things out as they go.

Thinking it is somehow more honorable to plan badly, throw peoples lifetime at the thing and getting a somewhat okayish result is really problematic in my eyes. Romantizing things that could have been solved by realistic (or even pessimistic) planning is not cool, it just shows me that you have no experience.

I studied film. I directed films and I was on more films sets than I wish I would have been. While this is certainly uncommon (especially in low budget productions), it is definitly not delusional. Quite the opposite, as I already argued.

So i wholly agree that the old adage "work smarter, not harder" applies here.

The fool is most likely yourself if you are available 24/7 and work long hours more often than not.

I had a side gig that very explicitly was being hired to be the guy that gets woken up by PagerDuty. They paid me about an extra $1k/month purely for having my phone on in addition to what they paid me for the time I spent dealing with actual issues. Even then $1k/month was only enough because most of the other work I did for them was explicitly to improve site availability so I could ensure the platform was resilient enough that I rarely got woken up. In effect my hourly rate for being woken up probably translated to $2k-$3k/hour, with it sometimes going half a year between being woken up, before suddenly a bad release might cost me sleep a few nights in a row.

But having felt the stress of this on a full-time basis in the past, without that kind of compensation, I don't think it's cost-effective to have your dev team serve this role vs. having a few people on retainer to at least triage and try the obvious things. You're going to pay for it with staff that do not get proper rest (even when the phone doesn't go off it'll be there at the back of your head).

The real questions then are how is the work divided, what does escalation look like, what steps are taken to reduce incidents outside of office hours, what's being done to allow for urgent maintenance to wait until office hours, etc, and also like how well is that all working, and where is the leadership in this?

I worked somewhere with not great answers to a lot of these questions, but it was okish because the cofounders were waking up with all the pages and hoping on to fix things too, and I had a mediocre experience with a dedicated ops team at a previous job that I didn't want to repeat. Eventually, as the team got bigger, we made a lot of things better, including on call responsibilities.

What most people don't think of is that when you're on 24/7 duty your salary is less than half of what it should be.

Halfway decent enterprises will reimburse you for off-hour duty usually at multiple times your normal rate plus a minimum pay. Or just hire someone in a different timezone.

The reality is though, most people don't need panic calls from their CEO at midnight and the company would still do perfectly fine without it. There really is no excuse for this.

When the company phrases their rejection as "we don't think you're committed enough to do this", that's when things smell off to me. They're hiring for a specific role, they should act like it.

As an analogy, if you hire me to build software, and then slip in that you expect me to spend 10 extra hours a week doing cold sales calls, I might turn down your job because I don't want to do sales, I'm an engineer. And the problem at that point isn't my commitment to the company, the problem is that the company hasn't figured out it needs to make the sales tasks part of the job description.

How do interviews get to this point? How does a company get to the point where you're talking to the CEO, they're laying out their exit strategies, and the job requirements still haven't been made clear?

> "we feel like you are not willing to put enough skin in the game" or "everyone else sees the opportunity here is is willing to work their asses off, why are you different?"

Those quotes say to me that the owners are viewing this as a question of "loyalty" or moral obligation, not as a normal part of a job negotiation. A good test: if the CEO feels offended that you ask for more compensation in exchange for being online 24x7, then this isn't about trying to hire a specific role, it's about their ego/entitlement.

One person wearing many hats is rather typical in small companies and early stage startups. Being asked to do extra is not something insulting per se, as long as you compensated accordingly, either with more hard money or (a lot more) equity.

It is a non-starter proposition to many, which should be respected. But it's not something borderline criminal.

> How does a company get to the point where you're talking to the CEO, they're laying out their exit strategies, and the job requirements still haven't been made clear?

Look, if we're still talking about a startup it could well be the interviewer is the CEO, the guy who brought you coffee is CFO and you're interviewing for CTO/dev/ops/support in one :)

That one little phrase sums up the problem with most startups. Hire someone who doesn’t know any better and tell them they are the “CTO”.

That means no stopping at the gym on the way home, no going into the city to see a show, no lengthy car journeys, no getting drunk, no going on dates, no evening classes, no school plays, no sport that takes you more than a block away from home, no taking your kids to the park to feed the ducks.

The idea you could have people be on call constantly sounds crazy to me.

These sorts of word games work on young naive people, especially young men. Maybe we need to broadly educate people that this sort of exploitation is not okay...

I consider myself on call 24/7 and tell my team this but in 3 years have never been woken up, nor have I had to wake someone else up. One day it will happen but once in 3+ years is perfectly reasonable.