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Why should I do production support?

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Re: Why should I do production support?

#11

Post by ed25519FUUU »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #7

If you aren't doing production support, you don't actually know your product. You aren't connected to the pain points your users experience and you miss what is, to your support team and your customers, the glaringly obvious. I would argue all developers should be required to do some support work.

Having skin in the game will make you a better engineer. You’ll get better at the non-sexy things: monitoring, alerting, testing, etc. You better believe a person who is pages for software at 3:00 am has an incentive to make that software more reliable.

Re: Why should I do production support?

#12

Post by ocdtrekkie »

ed25519FUUU wrote: post #11
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #7

If you aren't doing production support, you don't actually know your product. You aren't connected to the pain points your users experience and you miss what is, to your support team and your customers, the glaringly obvious. I would argue all developers should be required to do some support work.

Having skin in the game will make you a better engineer. You’ll get better at the non-sexy things: monitoring, alerting, testing, etc. You better believe a person who is pages for software at 3:00 am has an incentive to make that software more reliable.

I'm not even talking 24/7 pager work. But just tackling some support tickets as part of your job so you see where people are having issues with your product.

Too often I see BigCorp development teams seeming blatantly oblivious to where their pain points are, and it's because they aren't forcing their developers to do support. They're pushing code, but they aren't pushing code that solves real problems for people.

Re: Why should I do production support?

#14

Post by kevinmchugh »

MattGaiser wrote: post #10
aprinsen wrote: post #5

Teams I've worked on have not had dedicated support staff, but rather engineers rotate 24 hour support duties on a weekly basis. I have always had mixed feelings about "on call". I dread my turn on the rotation because the imminent threat of a prod issue has a psychological impact on my entire week, even off hours, and usually for a day or two after. If everybody on the team feels that way, maybe it can act as a forc…

The engineers at the organization I just departed (at least the ones in the support rotation which did not include me) got paid in both money and extra time off for their time spent on support tasks.

Yeah, I had a job where only certain teams had on call rotations. Anyone in those rotations got an extra half day off per week on call.

I've also seen folks spotted extra time off for really gnarly oncall shifts. Folks should push to have such accommodations standardized.

Re: Why should I do production support?

#16

Post by MattGaiser »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #12
ed25519FUUU wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having skin in the game will make you a better engineer. You’ll get better at the non-sexy things: monitoring, alerting, testing, etc. You better believe a person who is pages for software at 3:00 am has an incentive to make that software more reliable.

I'm not even talking 24/7 pager work. But just tackling some support tickets as part of your job so you see where people are having issues with your product. Too often I see BigCorp development teams seeming blatantly oblivious to where their pain points are, and it's because they aren't forcing their developers to do support. They're pushing code, but they aren't pushing code that solves real problems for people.

If you work for a Bigcorp development team, you are probably jus trying to keep a product owner happy. The user being happy or not will not ever impact your life, especially since you might well have moved on before it ever goes to prod.

Re: Why should I do production support?

#17

Post by dopylitty »

crossroadsguy wrote: post #9

You don't get anything out of burning out. You just burn out. And that time is not coming back. This post seems like an apologist talking. Production support alone is not that much of a problem. What the author skipped (conveniently? or forgot to mention?) is - it's really the "on call" phenomenon that's the problem. The "typical" on-call - where when you are on-call you are magically on-call 24x7. Yes, during your s…

The point about on-call is really critical and really on-point.

If a company thinks an application is important enough to run 24x7 then it should staff for 24x7 support. Stealing wages from workers by expecting them to be available 24x7 (on-call) is an absolute abuse.

It also leads to burn out, poor performance during the day (how is a dev's development ability when they were up at 2:30am on an incident call the night before?), and clouded thinking causing mistakes or impacting recovery time during incidents.

Re: Why should I do production support?

#18

Post by jonpurdy »

MattGaiser wrote: post #10
aprinsen wrote: post #5

Teams I've worked on have not had dedicated support staff, but rather engineers rotate 24 hour support duties on a weekly basis. I have always had mixed feelings about "on call". I dread my turn on the rotation because the imminent threat of a prod issue has a psychological impact on my entire week, even off hours, and usually for a day or two after. If everybody on the team feels that way, maybe it can act as a forc…

The engineers at the organization I just departed (at least the ones in the support rotation which did not include me) got paid in both money and extra time off for their time spent on support tasks.

Anecdotal of course, but a couple of jobs ago I did on-call rotations for a week on every few weeks. I got paid some additional money and time off, but the psychological impact was too great for me and it just wasn't worth it.

Re: Why should I do production support?

#19

Post by MattGaiser »

dopylitty wrote: post #17
crossroadsguy wrote: post #9

You don't get anything out of burning out. You just burn out. And that time is not coming back. This post seems like an apologist talking. Production support alone is not that much of a problem. What the author skipped (conveniently? or forgot to mention?) is - it's really the "on call" phenomenon that's the problem. The "typical" on-call - where when you are on-call you are magically on-call 24x7. Yes, during your s…

The point about on-call is really critical and really on-point. If a company thinks an application is important enough to run 24x7 then it should staff for 24x7 support. Stealing wages from workers by expecting them to be available 24x7 (on-call) is an absolute abuse. It also leads to burn out, poor performance during the day (how is a dev's development ability when they were up at 2:30am on an incident call the nigh…

They should also allow time and budget for building an application that can run 24/7 without too many errors.

"We need [insert thing manager asks for here] immediately" has consequences.

Re: Why should I do production support?

#20

Post by [deleted] »

crossroadsguy wrote: post #9

You don't get anything out of burning out. You just burn out. And that time is not coming back. This post seems like an apologist talking. Production support alone is not that much of a problem. What the author skipped (conveniently? or forgot to mention?) is - it's really the "on call" phenomenon that's the problem. The "typical" on-call - where when you are on-call you are magically on-call 24x7. Yes, during your s…

[deleted]
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