An easy correction is to only merge PRs from folks who are on the on call rota.
Those not on rota can either join or have their PR receive heavy scrutiny
An easy correction is to only merge PRs from folks who are on the on call rota.
Those not on rota can either join or have their PR receive heavy scrutiny
There are various technical corrections, with arguable pros and cons. However, they do not match the underlying problem stated above:
> the rise of business types in tech company leadership
The fact that they are PMs is a tragedy of circumstance, not a moral failing. If they are willing to go on-call for their work they will lose that childlike innocence and become engineers very quickly.
> they will lose that childlike innocence and become engineers very quickly.
I don't think so. Not everyone has an engineer mindset (or a PM mindset, for that matter). There's a reason these people ended up where they ended up.
Nah, the rota is large enough that it will likely be somebody else’s problem anyway and the chances are even if it does land on them they just won’t answer the phone.
Punishing mistakes with unpaid overtime has never been a good approach to quality. It just teaches management that they can get away with low quality because the engineers will pick up the pieces in their own time.
> unpaid overtime
Through European lenses this part seems insane. It is work, so pay me for it :) Every oncall rotation I was part of ever was paid, is the "unpaid" part a US thing, or was I just lucky?
Working as a SWE at Meta in the US pays 3-5x more than a European tech job (outside of Switzerland). They are paid for it.
Paid oncall in US big tech is the exception rather than the norm (notably, Google has paid oncall)
How does it work out with cost of living?
This is of course a complicated question. The US has many tax jurisdictions and widely variable cost of living, and jobs vary a lot. But I could compare, say, a Google engineer in Paris vs Seattle.
A Google senior software engineer in Paris earns €168k per year (according to levels.fyi) and takes home €96k after a 43% effective tax rate. A Google senior engineer in Seattle earns €336k and takes home €239k after 29% taxes, a 2.5x increase in take-home pay. According to Numbeo, cost of living in Seattle is 15-25% higher.
Of course, in America you have to fund your own retirement. As long as the pensions plans remain solvent, "savings" are a lot less important in Europe.
Anecdotally, I know people who were able to opt out of working altogether after 10-15 years in a large tech company in the US. I don't think this is common in Europe.
What use is earning all that extra cash if you're working yourself to death with no way to enjoy the money? I work in a large international org and despite the people in the US earning a lot more than their EU counterparts, they also pretty much universally seem more miserable, are working all sorts of odd hours, have basically no holidays (the amount of times I've gotten a "Vacation again!?" questions from people in the US is insane to me), have to stress more about doctors visits and stuff like that.
I've had a lot of opportunities to be earning a lot more than I do now by moving to the US, but seeing the state of the US I'm more than happy with my 32 hour contract and 5 weeks of vacations that I get to actually enjoy.
It's a reasonable question, and one that I've debated at length with friends, but which cannot be addressed satisfactorily in a brief exchange of internet comments :)
During the golden years of big tech in the states, when employee retention was king and it was pretty much impossible to fire someone who wasn't completely useless, I think it was a pretty good deal. Although East Coast work culture has always been pretty intense as you describe, a lot of West Coast people I know had good balance between work and everything else. Some people chose to work very hard and chase promotions, and others chose to go home early and spend their time with family or doing hobbies, and both ways were considered acceptable. The better companies offered 5 weeks of vacation, and people would go completely offline during that time, although some people would have to be cajoled by their managers to actually take the time off.
Recently it feels like things in the US have gotten much more intense and stressful, although the pay is as high as ever it does feel less worth it. People compete with their coworkers not just for promotion but for survival. There are still pockets where you can have both high pay and some sense of job security, but they are much scarcer than before.
I've heard of an American senior executive who was assigned to an Australian office and at first thought everyone was lazy but then after actually working there for a while he was sad to have to go back.
>Of course, in America you have to fund your own retirement.
Isn't social security a thing? Plus employer funded 401K also?
>As long as the pensions plans remain solvent, "savings" are a lot less important in Europe.
"As long as" is doing a lot of lifting here, and that's enough if you're lucky enough to own your own property and not have to pay market rate rent at your old age.
> Isn't social security a thing?
Social Security alone will, at best, slightly mitigate poverty. 401Ks are generally employee-funded, with some firms providing matching funds, especially during good economic times and where the firm is in a field where the main area of labor relied on relatively scarce so that there is competition for talent.
EDIT: The line about social security is a little inaccurate in the extreme case; its actually technically possible to reach a moderate income ($62k/year) on Social Security, if you have a long enough working career (35 years or more) earning at the maximum taxed wages for Social Security (currently $185k+) and claim at or beyond the age that maximizes the benefit calculation (70 years).
>Social Security alone will, at best, slightly mitigate poverty.
It's the same in Europe
Unpaid overtime is common across the continent for salaried positions. There's only a handful of jurisdictions where it's not the norm.
In the US it's common to either negotiate 'differential' pay for the responsibility, or as one might see in this thread, get suckered into it for free.
I think they meant to say that if the person isn't on the A-team call list, they aren't entitled to contribute without scrutiny.
This "receive heavy scrutiny" is part of the problem that is raised in the article though:
> You are friends with all the senior TLs, so can get them to review your code, but this is not a high-leverage use of time.
And then, tying back to ops comment, the engineer gets pinged for their bad metric, because of this additional review.
If 24/7 availability is required, the company should simply hire someone to work those hours, perhaps in a different timezone if needed. Many mistakes are going to be the result of management pressures to "ship" too quickly, incentivizing cutting corners, which someone will have to deal with at some point, even if it's during their regular working hours.