New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: Is being on-call becoming mandatory for senior software engineers?

Ask HN: Is being on-call becoming mandatory for senior software engineers?
4 by ingvul | 2 comments on Hacker News.
This is becoming a topic I cannot avoid anymore. As a junior (or even medior) software engineer no one expects you to be on-call, but as a senior software engineer the story changes dramatically. I have been avoiding being on-call successfully so far, but I don't think I can avoid it anymore: my current company is encouraging more and more software engineers to be on-call (paid) and many have accepted already. I have had a couple of job interviews for senior roles and they require on-call availability. I know that the rationale behind being on-call makes totally sense: teams own their products from conception to deployment and are fully responsible for the availability of their products (this nowadays means, 99.99% of the time, that the product has to be online 24h/day 365 days/year). This encourages teams to write "good code" that has minimum bugs and is performant. I know, it makes sense... but I value much more time than money and I cannot (I don't want to) give more than 40h/week to my employer. I cannot believe one cannot be a competent and professional senior software engineer without having to do on-calls. I mean, I have a damm master's degree in CS and I read dozens of books about programming and software engineering per year; I follow (I try to follow) the best practices and being up-to-date by reading sites like HN, I do side projects and contribute to open source... I just don't want to give away my free time just for more money. Anybody else in the same situation?

Don't forget to subscribe our youtube channel Click here:- http://www.youtube.com/c/techgk Product of the day