Are you comfortable with being woken up at 3am for a code release issue?
#softwareposition #interview #oncall #coding #experiences
Have you ever been asked in a job interview about your willingness to be woken up at 3am for a coding issue? How would you respond truthfully to such a question?
## Background:
– Interview for a software position at a company of interest
– Positive experience aligning with job requirements
– Manager’s inquiry about being on call at 3am
## Concern:
– Feeling of a red flag due to blunt question
– Not accustomed to such roles
## Previous Experience:
– Worked in environments with 24/7 on-call rotations
– Uncertainty about undefined on-call schedule
Share your thoughts or experiences in similar situations!
I’ve been asked similar questions before. It’s uncommon but it happens.
My answer would be along the lines of “I will do what it takes to work with the team to get the fire put out. However, such an issue would generally indicate a serious lapse of QA and I would want a postmortem with the team to figure out what went wrong and where we could improve.”
I think I might say “I would not be comfortable with it because it would mean we hadn’t done adequate testing, and I’d want to correct the test procedures to keep it from happening again.”
If this is a part of the job, I (as the interviewer) would make sure you understood that. I might word it differently, but this is one way of letting you know. Better to find out early in the process than later, or when you are actually working the job.
That’s a red flag for sure. That’s means it happens so often they specifically want someone who is willing to tolerate it.
Pink flag, like how often is this occuring.
lol, what? I turn my phone off before I go to bed. I’ll see you at 9am. I’ve never had a question like that. Worst I’ve had is “Are you cool with being on-call over the weekend?”
I think that would catch me off-guard and I’d fumble it honestly, that’s not a question I would ever expect either.
After thinking about it, I think I’d say something like “Once is fine, emergencies do happen, but I would call for an immediate retrospective the next morning to discuss what happened, why, and how we prevent it from ever happening again. Perhaps along with methods to minimize the time commitment of a solution at that hour, like a single-button software update rollback, so we can take our time to resolve the issue properly.”
O’course that’d be bullshit. Unless I work a specific job where people literally get hurt by these issues, I turn my phone off.
Software PM here. I’ve gotten up in the middle of the night and checked on deployment progress and even sent out status updates that I knew nobody else was up reading. When you are playing for all the marbles and a major release, you probably aren’t sleeping much anyway. I always want to be the first one in to smoke test after an upgrade or major release – you would likely have a team and hourly updates as you tick off the checked items.
If they wake you up just for patching, I’d nope out on that as they have the ability to roll back and reset until they work the bugs out.
Being on-call 24/7 for an enterprise software company as an engineer is not uncommon. Typically though it’s on a rotation, which I would ask about. I know at Amazon for example a senior engineer might be on-call 24/7 one week every two months or something like that depending on the team and product.
It’s not really a red flag if the compensation reflects that amount of responsibility and commitment. Almost every senior engineer I’ve known that’s making $200k+ has bitched about being on call at some point.
Depends on who is waking me and how.
“I can do that; for money!”
(Rubs fingers together)
-Galactic Federation official
Surely this will depend on the role, and in that specific example, what the code is being used for.
If you’re writing ambulance dispatch software, ‘are you ok being woken at 3am if there’s a critical bug that breaks the system?’ is reasonable, since that indicates risk to life. If you’re writing software that changes illumination levels in a doughnut shop based on atmospheric conditions, and you’re being woken at 3am to be told ‘We need to shift the light temperature by 100 kelvins’, that’s a pretty major red flag of problematic workplace.
Generally, severity of issue governs how reasonable that is, and your appropriate response.
I’d be very comfortable with it considering my phone won’t ring at that hour
Also depends on if it is an outsourced development setup with people in global time zones
Have the team in India handle it.
“Usually the best time to handle emergencies is ensure your people are fresh and have time and space to solve potential issues.
Frequently doing non emergency work, like software deployments, at 3AM indicates an immature work environment. While very rare situations may make this a good idea, as a common practice the organization should be mature enough to have zero down time, during the day operations, of software or any other critical asset. If I joined this company and you’re lacking in this area that would be one of the things I’d like to work on as a top priority”
Fully dependent if I am on call or not. Also, I can’t and won’t be on call 24/7 for more than a week at most.
So if I am on call and it’s a rotating schedule, then it’s just work
As long as I can call the developer (or his manager) to fix his goddamn shit, what do I care?
If they’re saying that to you in an interview then they want to make sure you’re comfortable with it. It’s a red flag for work life balance if I’ve ever seen one. Good luck.
I’ve been in IT Operations for my entire career so after-hours support is a given and they want to be sure you agree to that.
Is that bank of melons? 😂
Very uncomfortable. Turned down a job from them because of this.
On the other side I once had an interview in which they asked something similar and the correct answer was to say you’re uncomfortable because you’re not going to be thinking right to make changes to production.
I always assume, when I get left field questions like this, that the person who left the position had issues with this.
All the roles I am interviewing for now have a similar question.
Ngl, I have laughed or smiled every time. I usually follow up with “this is assuming this role is not an on-call position?”
Depending on how they answer that is how I formulate my answer. The first time I had this type of question asked, they refused to say it was on call but “that the expectation is that I will be available to support as needed.” Fuck. That. There is no amount of money for 24/7 availability. Doctors don’t even get asked for such nonsense.
I’m not I’m software so even if you are QA, what is the real expectation behind what to do at 3am with a code having issues? If the expectation is to fix it, does that mean fixing it takes 5 hours and therefore you will go home by 11am?
Personally, it’s going to be a hard pass for me to expect a day shift worker to have their sleep interrupted for any reason. Quality methods are fucked if you have to expect those often, and it might be a red flag if it’s currently happening frequently enough that they have to ask that question
How comfortable are you with paying extra for those hours?
If you are looking for a job in networking, it’s an usual thing here. It doesn’t happen very often though
“That depends on the waking up, are we talking storm warning, B&E, SWAT raid, fire, my inner monologue that won’t shut the fuck up, or is it just the goddamn cat barfing in the hallway again?”
Ok, but seriously, my reaction to code quality issues that result in a 3am phone call from work would be to immediately wonder why the QA team failed to do their job. Code quality issues should never be coming up during overnight deployment, that should have been tested long before it was approved for deployment.
If it happens repeatedly, my answer would then depend on what my actual role was. If I’m merely on the dev team, then I’m getting a little annoyed with my colleagues in QA. If I’m the QA manager, I’m getting a little annoyed with my team for missing stuff. If I’m on the deployment team, I’m not getting woken up because I’m on duty for the change.
It is a red flag. I’m in a unrelated industry but when they are asking about situations like this it means they anticipate them. You need to get them to clarify what the “on call” situations are and expectations are. If not they will take every inch of advantage of it.