despite working on a financial product where a production fire could actually cost normal people money (worst case scenario) I don't mind being on call at all.
Why? Because I never get called. Because we wrote tests. Because we were effing careful. Because we have safeguards in place. Because IT has put hardware redundancies in place and because we have circuit breakers.
Being on call only sucks if you're being made responsible for crappy software that breaks regularly.
That's a problem if you aren't empowered to make it better. If your team isn't encouraged to care. Better... find a place that does care. Find a place where people hate the idea of being awoken at 4 AM and do everything in their power to make sure it can't happen to anyone.
The last time i got called it was because AWS went down, and we couldn't do crap about that.
Absolutely this. I've worked on teams that do on-call rotations and teams that don't. What I typically find is that when you're on-call you work hard for your time off-work to be peaceful. Everything becomes infinitely better - code reviews, testing, deployments. When you do have an on-call issue that is beyond something simple and transient, it gets brought up in incident reviews for all engineering teams. This keeps everyone accountable and focuses team's efforts on patching anything that causes on-call pain. You really don't want to have to say anything in this meeting. And if you do on-call right and focus on quality, you're basically never doing anything during your rotation. On the flip side, when a team doesn't do on-call rotations the code quality suffers greatly.
Why? Because I never get called. Because we wrote tests. Because we were effing careful. Because we have safeguards in place. Because IT has put hardware redundancies in place and because we have circuit breakers.
Being on call only sucks if you're being made responsible for crappy software that breaks regularly.
That's a problem if you aren't empowered to make it better. If your team isn't encouraged to care. Better... find a place that does care. Find a place where people hate the idea of being awoken at 4 AM and do everything in their power to make sure it can't happen to anyone.
The last time i got called it was because AWS went down, and we couldn't do crap about that.