Oncall: An Equal Opportunity Waste of Time
summary
Argues that on-call is a waste of time because gatekeeping and hero culture make incidents more complex and preserve headcount. Recommends two exercises: a thought experiment where there is no on-call to right-size teams and ask if projects pass the giggle test, and a mandate that on-call be shared equally across engineers to surface what tooling, runbooks, or central Incident Management (example: Twilio) must exist. Cites policies like months-long qualification and 6–7 SREs/site as anti-patterns.
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chapters (7)
- 0:00Start
- 4:03The Reward for Good Work is More Work
- 8:18Oncall is a Waste of Time
- 11:02The Fetishisation of Incident Response
- 18:28Losing the Training Wheels
- 21:25A Post-Magical Era
- 27:26The SRE Value Proposition
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