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POV: you're getting paged as an oncall software engineer

@gazi.ai

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Why it worked

The video uses a highly relatable 'POV' format that taps into a specific professional subculture, creating a sense of community and shared experience among software engineers.

Summary

A software engineer documents her experience of being paged in the middle of the night to fix a production issue. She shows the process of diagnosing and resolving the problem while dealing with the stress of on-call rotations.

Structure

1Waking up to a page at 1:30 AM
2Diagnosing and fixing the issue
3Reflecting on the difficulty of sleeping after a page
4Getting a second page later in the night

On-screen text

POV: you're getting paged as an oncall software engineer It's currently 1:30 AM. 1:34 AM acknowledging the page 1:38 AM diagnose root cause 1:45 AM checking past incidents 1:49 AM trying a fix 2:10 AM documenting fix + next steps can new york weather behave itself Spoke too soon :) 3:20 AM dealing with second page 3:36 AM praying to the oncall gods and for myself

Transcript

It's currently 1:30 AM. I have like 15 minutes to respond before it escalates through the management chains. Let's get this issue fixed. 1:34 AM acknowledging the page. 1:38 AM diagnose root cause. 1:45 AM checking past incidents. My brain is literally lagging right now. 1:49 AM trying a fix. Thankfully it's not an outage, or I would have to talk to people right now. 2:10 AM documenting fix + next steps. Okay, I think I got it to a stage where it can wait till morning. Dealing with late night pages isn't the hard part; my brain just goes on haywire mode. It's the sleep after. I constantly think about getting paged and I can't sleep. Spoke too soon. Thankfully, it's something I know how to fix so it should be an easy one. 3:20 AM dealing with second page. 3:36 AM praying to the oncall gods and for myself.

Original caption

lovely oncall nights 🤗 jokes aside, oncall is a normal part of software engineering but doesn’t get talked about enough. most teams with customer-facing products have rotations, and many don’t pay overtime. some teams get paged constantly, others rarely. it varies wildly, but it’s part of the deal when you own production systems. #oncall #softwareengineer