Oncall — A Nightmare or Golden Opportunity

In the software engineering domain, on-call has always been one of the most dreaded weeks. The constant pressure of late-night pages or a sudden outage where you could have no idea what to do seems daunting to process. I started working as a Software Engineer in 2017. That is when I came across the concept of on-call. It seemed peculiar that the software system that was inherently broken required manual efforts to fix it, just like something customer service folks do when you face an issue with a service or product offered. Quite often it would be that we had built the system or it was a legacy software system from a previous generation of Software Engineers who left the organisation. But given we were the service owners then, we were bestowed with the responsibility to support any issues, that occur during business operations. But, is it something that every engineer should look forward to? In my opinion, that is a big astounding YES! Following are some of the reasons why this is true: <h1>An onboarding experience like nothing else</h1> When I joined one of my past teams, I had no idea how the system operated at the implementation level. I was involved in a project where I got a chance to enhance how the UI gets displayed and how to make our APIs more flexible to changing requirements. But the diverse set of software systems you get to explore during on-call tenure is next to nothing imaginable. I got the chance to dive deep into a module I had never worked on before. Eventually, I was able to have the foresight to use it in one of my next projects instead of building it from scratch, saving considerable engineering time. <a href="https://medium.com/engineering-with-karan/oncall-a-nightmare-or-golden-opportunity-a49662bb8c51">Visit Now</a>