Ask HN: I can’t do oncall rotations. Am I done as a SE?

Been working as a developer for enough time to put on my CV the word “senior”, and I’m looking for another gig. My usual tactic when finding a new job is:

- play their game: do countless interviews (phone, hangouts, pair programming, you name it) - excel in each part of the interview - once they know I’m a good fit for their company, I ask more than they usually pay for whatever the role I am applying for. Sometimes I ask for more vacation days or other similar perks

Now, I have to say that my tactic has worked out so far so good. Recently, though, I have been hitting a wall: oncall rotations. I reject any kind of work besides the usual 9-5; it’s nonnegotiable for me. I don’t need more money (it’s not that I’m earning a lot either), but even if I would needed it, I would prefer to work “harder” (smarter?) during the usual 9-5 hours.

The stress of potential incidents occurring during the night or on weekends gives me anxiety and no amount of money can fix that. Unfortunately, companies these days require senior software engineers to be oncall from time to time because, well, their culture says so, or something like that (“In this company every team owns their products from conception to deployment and maintenance. We expect from engineers to have a business mindset, to be proficient using a variety of tech stacks, and to be there to keep the software up and running in case of unexpected failure”).

Is this a trend or I just got bad luck in my recent findings?

Edit: sector is web development.

Same here. I’ve been a software engineer for 20+ years and I’ve never been on call. I’ve put out fires and fixed urgent bugs, of course.

I think it’s fine to set boundaries. I joined an organization and 6 months in was invited to a meeting (with 30 other devs) to discuss our onboarding to prod support on the weekends and such. I politely refused and held firm. I’ve done enough of that that I never want to do it again.

It’s still an employees market out there. Find something that fits.

Agree. I would go further and say: good companies hire SREs to be the ones on-call (just like good companies hire QA engineers for testing, and designers for UI/UX topics).

Some options:

- contracting/consulting - quite often no on-call duty as it is tricky to bill,

- working on software for brick&mortar businesses, such who usually overlap with your work hours,

- working in R&D area where you don't touch prod, where there is a dedicated team who does the integration, deployment and prod support - often quite popular in big organizations with long release cycles etc.