This is exactly why I gave up a position as a full stack / devops engineer in favor of going back to low level drivers - there were too many unknowns, and far too many unknown unknowns often paired with expectations of prompt (and cheap) solutions to complicated issues.
Technically it was interesting and challenging, but in terms of stress just not worth it. You could pay me twice my current salary and I still would not go back to it. Now I try to place myself as far away from paying customers as technically possible.
Re:Breaking Up with On-Call
by tenacious_tuna on Tuesday March 18, 2025 @12:12PM
(#43401120)
How'd you manage the transition (back?) to low-level? I would love to do chip work (or really anything systems-y) but all my experience is fullstack/webdev. Every time I apply I get bounced for insuffficient domain experience.
I started off my career in low level stuff and transitioned upwards to web. I’ve always been all over the place in terms of tech so it wasn’t particularly big steps either way. I’ve usually got something low level-ish going on at home. Emulator development, robotics, …
Re:Breaking Up with On-Call
by AlotOfReading on Tuesday March 18, 2025 @12:00PM
(#43401001)
Oncall is becoming popular even for low level. My last few roles have all required it for reasons I've been unable to figure out beyond "all developers need on-call and you're a developer". In my case, a fix often requires hardware access and my commute is longer than the start-work SLA.
Re:Breaking Up with On-Call
by thor_molecules on Tuesday March 18, 2025 @11:33AM
(#43400670)
> ...far too many unknown unknowns often paired with expectations of prompt (and cheap) solutions to complicated issues.
That describes pretty much all of my "full-stack" experience.
What sort of job/background do you have where you are writing low level drivers? I'd love to get into that side of things but I don't know where to start.
No, for me, the real pain with oncall is that there are a lot of systems in my team. I understand well maybe 30% of it. I'm clueless about 30%. In between for the rest. I can try to fix issues myself (take long time, issues can add up), triage (but means bothering someone else). There are also things than nobody understand, and if they break, it can mean extra days of work for you with extra-stress because you don't know how hard it can be to fix.
Then, some people in the team ship code without adequate testing, because of pressure to ship. Which often adds work to the oncall. So there's all this extra tensions with colleagues which can be hard to deal with for an introvert.
Overall, it "kind of" works for us, but I agree with the conclusion, it sucks. It's really the worst part of my job. I went into software engineering because I like coding. Not because I liked monitor unreliable systems. And I think unreliability is encouraged by management to some extent. That keeps people at work.