In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

I am a senior software engineer in a big tech/faang company and this week is my first ever on call rotation. My team is doing a lot of CI work, monitoring pipelines and support queues during on call. It is probably not as much of a hassle as on call for product teams, but for me personally on call was the nearest I have ever been to hell.

Our on call is not the regular getting pinged when something goes wrong, instead we have to manually monitor a dashboard 12 hours constantly for 7 days as the alarming is quite fuzzy.

I am the only EU remote worker that has to adopt to the on call PST timezone. That means, my on call shift goes from 3pm-3am in my timezone. It is day 5/7 and I am down 24 energy drinks already, cause this was the only way to stay wake. Knowingly, that this would be just a short-term tradeoff against health, I am now living through the most explosive diarrhea I have ever had. On top, I am sleep derived, dizzy and every body part hurts.

That would already be terrible on its own, yet I additionally have a young family, with a 4 year old and a toddler. The on call week, has not only been though on me, but especially also on my children and wife. I don’t have time for the kids at all and my wife is doing 100% of everything at the moment, including waking up, breakfast, bringing our son to kindergarten, cooking, cleaning, playing, everything. She is also quite exhausted therefore.

Besides On Call, my job has been great and a huge monetary opportunity that is very rare in the EU, therefore quitting just because of 4-5weeks/year is not an option I am considering. Yet, I am wondering if there could be any way of smuggling myself out of the on call rotation. I have seen, that a staff level engineer on our team is not participating in the rotation, but that might be because he got a lot going on with other teams as well.

A listener named bebop asks,

Is your average “Big Tech” dev “better” than a random dev selected from a large non-technology company? I can’t help but feel that if I want to level up my career, I’m going to have to either move into big tech or some unicorn startup.