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Comment by FireBeyond | Hacker News Reader

Bleh. As a DevOps guy who is a paramedic, I just cringed at the image of someone sprinting to the computer (I know it's exaggerated - or at least I hope so).

We don't run to cardiac arrests. Walk fast, with a purpose. I fail to see what production issue necessitates me running down the hall at 3am.

And DevOps students should be learning how to prevent (sorry, minimize) this, not conducting fire drills.

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As a DevOps guy at a startup, I'm expected to respond to alerts within 1-3 minutes at my current employer, 24/7 when I'm on my rotation. We rotate devs in to allow them to try building something "devopsy", but they're never included in the on-call rotation.

Its unsettling.

> I'm expected to respond to alerts within 1-3 minutes at my current employer, 24/7 when I'm on my rotation

That's ridiculous. That's "Guess I can't take the dog outside this week" territory.

That's beyond unsettling. It's absurd. What happens if it takes you 4 minutes to wake up enough to realize what's going on at 2:30 am?

If you're lucky enough to have someone from engineering on the chat client at the time, they jump in, and it reflects poorly against you.

I realize the expectations are unrealistic, but as I'm sure most people know, your options are to leave or stick it out.

There are more than two options. For instance, you can document this is an expectation of you, and you can document all of the times you are on call. Then you can sue them for unpaid overtime.

lol, OT for IT workers. Good one.

We're part of a very special group that employers are legally allowed to screw over regarding OT. Because reasons.

Actually I would really like to know the context of how that law got passed, if anyone has insights.

1-3 minutes is nuts. So what I'm reading is you have nothing in the way of redundancy or even a means to die gracefully. Just zero or garbage fire.

There is some autoremediation in place, but the expectation for responsiveness is top down. Efforts to bring sanity to the situation go ignored. Its been made clear (not directly, but through process) that there are a line of people who could take the job if that level of responsiveness isn't delivered.

There is always someone willing to take your job. Most won't have what it takes. But managers will use that to cow you into a shitty bargaining position.

Look I've been you. I took the crappy job because I figured that was the only one available. There are better companies out there. Just ask around. Get a few offers.

There is nothing normal about being on call with a 1-3 minute response time. I'm pretty sure it's illegal as well.

Does anyone die if you don't respond? Because I can understand those kind of response times if you're a paramedic or ambo driver, but otherwise it sounds like power-tripping bullshit from bad managers.

> Does anyone die if you don't respond?

Not at all.

That's considered waiting. You're entitled to compensation.

I hope you're being paid in full for that.

I'm actually $10K under market average.

Uhm — get out, I guess?

You really should be job hunting, your current role sounds abusive.

What are you meant to achieve in 1-3 mins? Answer the alert or be at a workstation?

How are you meant to have anything resembling a normal life?

You should consider finding another job. I'm being serious. Yes there are generally internal SLAs and MTTR type metrics but setting a hard limit of 1 - 3 minutes to respond is not common practice at all. It speaks volumes about your management and perhaps their lack of experience/maturity. I'm speaking from a number of years of experience of working in this capacity.

Yes exactly. Waking someone up at 3:00AM as a training exercise is ridiculous. That prepares you for nothing. Is this really part of the curriculum for a school that charges 17% of your first 3 year's salary after completing the course? Terrible.

3 years??? Holy cats. I doubt that would hold up in non-compete court.

Yeah what a joke right?

"That is why there is no upfront cost to join Holberton school. We only charge 17% of your internship earnings and 17% of your salary over 3 years once you find a job. If the company you join agrees to pay us a placement fee, this percentage will be reduced."

https://www.holbertonschool.com/education

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