Why should I do production support?

> This attitude almost always turns into the following: [...]

Well, that's another problem (the dev not being able to solve a bug that reappears at 3AM).

> The alerts are fixed in two weeks. Site reliability goes up. Apps suddenly become more resilient to failure.

I always wondered why DevOps has the "Dev" in its title. At least, in most of the companies I have worked on, it was DevOps the ones that were on call (payed), but they were very picky regarding what they can touch/work on (they almost never touched application code... we should call them "Ops" then, no?).

> Honestly, the whole attitude of not wanting to work more than 8 hours is privilege.

And it's a privlege I'm thankful for. What's wrong with that?

> As a dev, you get a good salary and a job you don't have to break your body to do.

We do break our body to do software engineering (our brains, to be more specifically). If you think physical work >>> brain work, well, that's relative. Every person is different, and for me, brain work is equally taxative as physical work.

> And it helps you as an engineer. Like the article points out, it creates empathy for the users and product support engineers, it helps you improve architecture and app design, and it helps you understand different failure domains

I know I can become better by working harder and smarter (it's obvious), but I just want to be the best version of myself by putting at most 40h/week. Isn't that something honourable in itself? Or does that make me a "bad engineer"?

This attitude is terrible and exploitative. Employee's have a duty of fidelity and good faith to their employer, sure - but highly skilled and in-demand engineers should demand better of their employees.

> How is software dev breaking your body? Are you typing with your face?

I wrote about it. I consider my brain just like any other muscle of my body, so after 8 hours of work, my brain is quite tired. Perhaps my wording was wrong.

> If you want to be the best version of yourself within 9-5, please fix the bugs that alert on-call the first morning you hear about them. Most developers never do this, which is why they are put on call.

Agree.

> you are hired by a company to make a product that works, so if your product isn't working, you need to fix it

Agree as well, but my contract states "40 hours per week". I'm being plain straightforward here, I'm not willing to give anything for free to any company (does that happen the other way around? Never). Not sure what's "wrong" with this.

> And I stop at 40hr/week too, but once every 8 weeks, I get a few calls about broken shit, and I put in the time to help prevent those from re-occurring, because most people I work with don't.

I have nothing against that, and I respect it. I guess the other way around should work as well, right? Like, if someone is not willing to give more than what's stated in their contract, that should be fine for everyone. What you call "help" sure it's help, but companies are taking it as free labor. I have nothing against companies making money, but I do not support companies making money without having to pay employees for that. But the main point of my first comment was: even though companies are paying for being on-call, one should have the option to say 'No, thanks. I don't want to give you my free time in exchange for more money. I already have enough with my 40h/week schedule', and that should be fine for everybody.