Depends on the size of the team. Startup or small team? Yes. Everyone is on call all the time. Large number of developers? Someone on every team is on call all the time, and leads need to be almost always available for large outages.
On call pretty much just comes with the job, and always has.
I suppose for the vast majority of software engineers working on online / SaaS type products or ones that silo a lot of customer data, this is true.
Always has is a bold assertion. I've worked for companies which produced consumer level software on an annual cycle that was pressed to physical CDs, and there was not even a concept of on-call. Bugs that got reported went from customer support, to QC to corroborate, and finally triaged out to the R&D department where they would be fixed within normal work hours.
This idea of 100% 24/7 on-call to fight fires in an industry where the vast majority of engineers are working for insurance companies, social media, e-commerce, etc. This ain't life and death people, let's get some perspective.
> On call pretty much just comes with the job, and always has.
Maybe for you but not for everyone and I bet outside Silicon Valley startup land and certain industries it is probably less common than you think. I work in government which is basically 8-5 local business hours. Production issues can take days, weeks, months to fix and deploy depending on priorities. Most of my dev friends have never had on call roles either. Plenty of companies have enough staff to have around the clock coverage. Just trying to add an additional perspective.
Those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it, or words suchlike (from Santayana, I guess?).
I don't know if I'll ever see things like devops and agile die the horrible deaths that they deserve - but I do wish engineers would at least learn to think for themselves and not drink so freely of the kool-aid that CEOs peddle.
Sad part is that devops was never meant to be a title, just a way to work together effectively as a team that included developers, qa, ops, pm, etc. Devops was much like agile, they were great ideas and ways to work, but then got cargo culted to death and today managers have taken them as buzzwords and thrown away all the stuff you actually needed to do to get good results.
Management always takes good ideas and extracts the absolute worst stuff from them, if they don’t just make up shit on the fly that wasn’t even a part of the original good ideas.
Yes indeed. Management almost always bastardizes good ideas and makes them terrible; and then they take it a notch further by finding and nurturing kool-aid connoisseurs in the levels below.
It was pretty common say 25 years ago when you would be developing in a terminal. When you were limited in the number of lines displayed, it sometimes made it easier to follow the code when functions and control structures were large.
I know I had coworkers using brief configured to do that.
So I worked for RealPage for a few years in the late 90s and again in the mid 2000s, and at the time they didn’t hold a majority of the market. But it would not surprise me now if they held a majority of the market in large complexes today. At the time they were growing mostly by acquisition of competitors.
It could be an age thing. When I was taught grammar 40 plus years ago, for someone of indeterminate sex, “he” was taught as always appropriate, “he or she” was a somewhat clunky alternative that was situationally appropriate where you were stressing the gender neutrality, and “they” was just simply bad grammar which would get you bad marks. I’m honestly not sure when that changed.
Indeed. I was taught very directly that the singular pronouns were he, she, and it. The plurals were we, you, they. So grammatically if you were referring to a singular person of unknown sex, then you should use "it" .
Obviously using the pronoun "it" at some point became offensive, so is highly not recommended. But, (probably after having drilled into my head repeatedly that "they" is a plural) it seems very incorrect to my ears when "they" is used to describe a singular person. It also unfortunately comes with ambiguity sometimes. I've had misunderstandings where I used they as a singular pronoun to describe someone of unknown gender, and the person I was talking to took it as a reference to a plural, which at best creates confusion, at worst misleads.
Language is an incredibly hard problem, and it certainly doesn't help that as youth, we are drilled with supposedly objective truth regarding language, when in reality it is far less defined and more nebulous than than the teachers would have us believe. The generational gaps can already be tricky to navigate. Having different ideas of objective truth, especially regarding language, certainly does not help.
Because this often ends up with people talking past each other, never until a few years ago did anyone use singular they for a known, specific person. Shakespeare used it for unknown or nonspecific people.
In casual use, yes. In formal writing, the broad switch to acceptance of singular "they" is only about 15 years old. Up until that point it's the sort of thing that would be flagged by an editor, or lose you marks in an English paper.
I'd be shocked if that were universal over that time, given that even formal language has undergone many changes in attitude. Over hundreds of years, I bet that in many times and places it has not considered it a problem, particularly given its use in the King James Bible.
“They” is particularly convenient when discussing about people over the internet, because not only we don't have to assume the person's gender, but we don't have to assume if it's an individual or a group either.
And tbh using gender in pronouns is artificially annoying, and it's good to see English has a way out of it, like it got rid of giving genders to common objects like most European languages (“Non, it's La chaise, chair is feminine in French” -_-').
Languages hold complexity in different areas, but that doesn't make it artificial. Grammatical gender (and noun classes more generally) may seem redundant, but redundancy in language is quite common. It helps disambiguate, as it turns out speech (especially, but writing too) is a very lossy method of communicating.
(You seem perfectly happy distinguishing between animate/inanimate nouns and choosing "it" or "he/she/they" -- that's a difference not all languages make, but should we get rid of it in English too?)
1. "it" does not distinguish between animate and inanimate nouns:
The baby grunted again, and Alice looked very anxiously into its face to see what was the matter with it. — Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
But he [Jesus] said to them, "It is I; do not be afraid." — John 6:20
2. gender distinction is artificial because it's not based on anything real, rather it's based on whether the "vibes" that a person (or an inanimate object in European languages) that you're referring to gives off are more feminine or more masculine. this "redundancy" creates all sorts of trouble for folks who are not comfortable with the "vibes" society assignes them with a particular gender at a given moment. the problem here is not that the speech is lossy, but that this particular "feature" of language demands that you convey the person's identity when it's almost always irrelevant in a way that's exclusive to gender (thank God nationalism wasn't invented when the language was forming)
1. Yes, as with many "rules" in language there are exceptions. I would find it a bit odd to refer to a baby as "it" in (current) English, though I do admit there are some situations where it wouldn't feel as out of place.
In my read of the Bible quote, it's not really referring to a person as "it" in the same way.
2. Grammatical gender has nothing to do with the "vibes" of an inanimate object - it's quite arbitrary, really. The problem you're associating here is much more with gender in humans, but we were talking about the grammatical construct applied to objects (like a chair as the grandparent mentioned).
So, as far as I understand it, gender pronouns are typically for referring to individuals. This means that whether to call a baby, or animal, by gender pronouns or object pronouns varies depending on the expectation.
('gender pronouns' includes singular they/them, which is a 'gender pronoun' in the way that it perhaps, if you will, implies the 'gender' of 'neuter'...)
I guess a generally understood term for this would be "humanization", although as someone who identifies non-human that still sounds somewhat exclusive, but regardless, that is what I generally observe to be the difference.
So, it's possible to refer to a baby or an animal as an object, if, in doing so, you intend not to assign that object any individuality; in other words, if you're referring to it in a non-individualistic way.
e.g. "I needed to change its diaper again today" ("dehumanizing"; I guess shows a lack of empathy, but not everyone necessarily feels empathy for the baby before it is more markedly an individual)
It's also possible to refer to a non-individual (such as an inanimate object) as an individual, which, in doing so, typically implies that the non-individual nonetheless has some sort of individuality or that you're specifically assigning it such.
e.g. referring to ships / other vehicles using 'she'; also, giving everyday objects individuality is a relatively common part of Japanese culture (which is part of why Apple's recent "Crush!" ad upset so many)
Typically, it's respectful to refer to people as individuals because they are. It is "dehumanizing" to suggest otherwise. (seriously, is there a better word for this?)
Some prefer to be referred to as objects instead, though; I know at least one like this. But those will typically specify it in some way, and it's rude not to refer to any one as an individual unless otherwise specified.
> not only we don't have to assume the person's gender, but we don't have to assume if it's an individual or a group either.
as someone with DID (formerly called Multiple Personality Disorder) this is actually kind of a nice bonus. (though people still often use he/him pronouns to refer to specifically me, which is fine)
When I got my first cable modem in maybe 1995, there were about half a dozen of my neighbors computers in Network Neighborhood. Most with unprotected shares and printers. Basically everyone running Windows on my C block. It got cleaned up within a few months tho.
Pre-cable modem era, the dialup networking "adapter" in Windows 95 was bound to "File and Print Sharing". People who had both a LAN and a modem could inadvertently "share" with the Internet.
I may or may not know something about sending print jobs that said "FEED ME CHEESE" in Figlet to inadvertantly shared printers and waiting for pings to stop coming back.
I stand corrected (sort of). I did specifically say that you‘d see zero other machines when connected to the Internet over a point-to-point link, but I indeed had no idea that in the US there were cable modems from different subscribers within the same subnet/segment and without any filtering.
In Germany, as far as I can tell it was all point-to-point.
That being said, around that time, or maybe slightly later, completely unencrypted WiFi networks were also commonplace, so…
You’re lucky it was only a few months. I think it took until 1999 or 2000 for my cable isp to subnet their entire /16 so that you weren’t flooding the entire city with broadcast packets, getting random windows messaging service messages, etc.
That said, it was super nice to open Quake 3 and be able to plan LAN mode with anyone in town.
Saw something similar at the summerhouse of a friend around 2008 or 2009. Somehow the whole neighborhood was in one giant LAN with one another there, sharing a common gateway to the internet? Around 30 or some such computers of neighbors showed up. Super weird.
I have video from my dashcam of a Waymo taxi doing a sudden three lane change, in moderately heavy traffic, to do a left turn to enter a freeway. This was a month or so ago. I really hope a human was involved in that. If not, there’s no way I would consider riding in one. If an officer had seen it, they would likely have written a ticket to a human.
Even worse, you can get caught with no return flight. In late 2001, I was flying back home to Dallas from Prague, connecting in Brussels. And the airline I was on, Sabena, declared bankruptcy the very day of the flights.
I got lucky, if your flight left before 8am you were rebooked on a different airline. After 8? You were out of luck and on your own. My flight had been scheduled for 7:50.
My wife and I had a somewhat similar thing happen, one week before our wedding. She had a debit card declined at Starbucks.
Someone had printed a business check with our account number, made out to a name that matched a dead person on the sex crimes registry, and then someone had cashed that check at a bank in New Jersey. The check was for over $11k, and left about $20 in the account.
Now, we never left that much money in the account generally but we had transferred some in to settle with the various vendors and for spending cash on the honeymoon.
The good news was that Chase saw it as fraudulent immediately and the money was back in our account in less than 48 hours, and they put a few thousand in before then so we could travel.
Security is hard, in whatever field. Customers do want to be able to get service at their bank, without jumping through crazy hoops.
That said, bank security in the US is generally awful. Checks should not exist - they are a concept out of another era. Actually, in the US, just having someone's account number enables you to withdraw money from their account. That is just nuts.
By now, all money transfers should be electronic and immediate. Where I am, we use the "Twint" service. Want to pay in a shop? Scan a QR code off the card reader, then click ok. Want to send money to a private person? Select them from your contacts, enter the amount, click ok. Transfers are completed in seconds, which also eliminates the issue of bouncing checks.
On call pretty much just comes with the job, and always has.
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