HACKER Q&A
📣 nizo

Worst On-Call Tasks?


I recently quit my job to build a 24/7 on-call AI engineer. I'm starting small with simple monitoring via Github and Grafana integrations; see my previous post(s) for more info.

Questions: - What were the worst tasks you had to do on your on-call rotation? - What do you wish could have been automated? - Is there a world where we can eliminate on-call rotations entirely? - What are some similar ideas in this realm?

  👤 pavel_lishin Accepted Answer ✓
The worst tasks are:

1. Evaluating whether some given page/alert/whatever is actually a problem, and whether it's an actionable one that needs to be dealt with

2. Doing the triage & work to understand the root cause, while at the same time also acting as a coordinator, unless your job has those roles split up in such a way that it's very easy to delineate those roles automatically.

👤 GianFabien
In my experience the worst are the recurring call-outs which could have been easily solved had the management been willing to invest in whatever is necessary to fix the root-cause.

The second worst experience is management breathing down your neck, demanding status updates every 5 minutes when the fix takes hours and with their interruptions even longer.

My preference would be to replace 90% of management with AI that we program to meet our expectations.