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Comment by ggeorgovassilis | Hacker News Reader

> You expect to not be responsible for what happens to the software you put into production?

First: IT seems to be rather the exception - most professions have no on-call. Eg. even if my car mechanic screws up a service job, they'll have me bring the car back into the garage during their normal working hours, regardless of how and where stranded I am in the middle of the night.

A second comment: I'll be responsible for anything I have created in my own way. The reality of software development is that we implement functional requirements we've been given with which we disagree, we implement non-functional requirements which don't achieve the goal, we are made to use frameworks and tools we're not familiar with, on a short timeline, a low budget and inadequate infrastructure and we're supposed to take responsibility for code our co-workers wrote.

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> IT seems to be rather the exception

I think there’s actually a fair number of jobs where some level of this is expected.

Doctors are one obvious example — they have on call responsibilities often more onerous than IT, and depending on the situation don’t always receive additional compensation for it.

If you manage people who work different hours from you, in a lot of jobs it’s not uncommon to be called in if shit hits the fan when you’re not working (for example if you’re a hotel manager, to just name one).

I’ve found that any good lawyer I’ve worked with will answer my calls and help me work through things at basically any time of day (their firm might be billing me for the time, but that doesn’t necessarily directly translate to their comp).

Lots of reporters are expected to cover news that breaks on their beat, no matter when it happens.

> Doctors are one obvious example — they have on call responsibilities often more onerous than IT, and depending on the situation don’t always receive additional compensation for it.

My doctor (primary care physician) doesn’t work outside of business hours. In an emergency the recorded message says to call an ambulance and go to the emergency department at the hospital, which is staffed by a different set of people.

So it seems they do have at least some separation of the oncall aspect?

Lawyers are another story, there’s a lot of things wrong with that profession and we shouldn’t be trying to copy them.

If you go to most hospitals at 2AM and need a specialist of some kind (say a specific type of surgeon), there’s going to be someone in that specialty on call whose going to get paged to wake up, come in, and see you.

Even in family practice, it’s not uncommon to be able to get a call back from the on call doctor at the practice on weekends or off hours — if you’ve got a situation that maybe doesn’t warrant the ER, but you’re not sure if it can wait until Monday.

> If you go to most hospitals at 2AM and need a specialist of some kind (say a specific type of surgeon), there’s going to be someone in that specialty on call whose going to get paged to wake up, come in, and see you.

Only if you're dying.

Come in late Friday and you're going to be sitting in a bed until Monday even if your gall bladder is about to explode.

Sorry, you’re right. Doctors have it way easier than software engineers.

Sarcasm simply serves to undermine any valid points that you have.

The point was that "on call" is specifically confined as an expectation only to certain types of doctors or under very urgent circumstances.

In addition, doctors have extra special dysfunctions like "too many hours in a shift".

However, many of these are because doctors also have been fighting various efforts to teach more of them which would enable distributing the required extra labor across more people.

Funny, my wife is primary care yet does on call via answering service. You clearly don’t know what you’re talking about.

Funny, I chose that gall bladder example precisely because I had it happen to me.

In addition, I had something similar happen where I wound up needing Interventional Radiology to insert a drain--again wound up waiting from Friday to Monday morning.

I'm sure some of those doctors were "on call". However, nobody was calling them in unless I started dying.

I definitely don’t think they have it easier. They work hard and the stakes are much higher.

But what you’re talking about is a person whose job it is to be oncall. It’s the equivalent of an SRE, rather than a SWE. They’re not doing it because they believe in “you build it, you run it” or anything like that.

I went in to a hospital at just after midnight, and had my gall bladder out by noon. No, the surgeon wasn’t called in early, but the radiologist who diagnosed the gall bladder was.

This is wrong on so many levels.

No they don't.

I know plenty of people who have had to sit around for 8+ hours because the particular type of doctor is not available. The on call only really applies if you're bleeding out.

In my 20+ years of development and support, there has only been once that I was paged due to an actual catastrophic failure. Most are because shitty "SREs" wants monitoring on everything, even if its stuff that I have no control over.

> Doctors are one obvious example — they have on call responsibilities often more onerous than IT, and depending on the situation don’t always receive additional compensation for it.

I mean.... On call doctors literally save lives. Most on-call software engineers don't. So.

But think of the shareholders!

Doctors, firemen and cops are obvious examples, but I've called plumbers at 2am because of a burst pipe flooding the basement. I've called locksmiths well past closing time due to lockout. I've called landlords at all hours for apartment emergencies. Society needs on-callers of all kinds. It's not surprising that some people are vociferously against holding the pager, and I sincerely wish those people success in avoiding it. But someone will always have to step up and they should be appropriately rewarded for it (I've been on-call and was considered lucky to have gotten overtime for it, which I think is strange because it's just a well-aligned incentive structure that any smart company should have)

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