I clicked expecting a
What's the worst / most creative thing you'd do to get yourself fired? thread.
But I'll play.
My $dayjob involves hosted healthcare software. Looks more like bespoke outsourcing than SaaS. I'm on a two-person team responsible for a relatively tiny number of systems within each customers' deployment. Officially I'm on-call every other week. In reality, on a team this small, everyone is always on-call.
During my first year here, we busted ass to reduce after-hours calls -- cleaning up our own messes, giving support teams access to handle certain internal items, demanding better judgement of "Is this potentially affecting medical outcomes, or can this wait until normal working hours?", etc.
This year the company launched a more formalized and automated Major Incident process. Much human judgement has been removed -- if a Major Incident is raised, every team is contacted by a PagerDuty-like system to join a WebEx.
At the start of implementing this process, I found myself being called out-of-schedule by the automated systems. MIs weren't being raised that often so it took a few weeks to figure out that we were both being called every time and then months of venting to everyone up-the-chain as MIs were increasing in frequency before they finally believed us and got the right person engaged to fix it.
Then the reality of having a process with little human judgement really started to sink in. People default to CYA behavior. We're getting called for things that don't come close to meeting the criteria for a Major Incident. Often the MI process is initiated after the right teams have been engaged and are working towards resolution. We're getting stuck on calls for hours where the incident manager doesn't want to release anyone, "just in case they're needed later."
Right now I feel thoroughly abused by this process and automation and being such a small team. We've removed too much human discretion, and where there's any left, it's being exercised poorly. The anxiety I and my family experience when my phone rings is palpable.
Apart from this aspect of my employment, my job is pretty cush. The work itself isn't stressful, most of my coworkers are great to work with, management is above-average, PTO is generous. I've been officially 100% remote for three years now and at this point my life is completely structured around the freedom it provides. My salary is relatively high for direct W2 employment in my field -- nobody has come close to offering a big enough bump to make up for the monetary expenses of a soul-crushing commute, loss of benefits for a contract gig, and needing to pay for after-school care for my girlfriend's twins. Nevermind the intangibles.
Which makes me feel trapped.
The girlfriend changed jobs last month, trading a negligible amount of salary relative to shaving a dozen stressful commuting hours from her week and getting home about the same time as the kids. So that's a massive improvement to our lives -- I say 'our' because, aside from happier wife happier life, I'd not fully appreciated the burden I was feeling this past year having to be at home for the kids on an inflexible schedule -- plus we've removed the greatest obstacle to my changing jobs...
Tho I still feel fairly pessimistic about finding another job that doesn't leave me worse off financially or mentally.