[rohgpt]

I used to be on-call too. I still have muscle memory of the buzz that’d make me leap off my couch like my house was on fire. Except it wasn’t. Just prod, doing prod things.

We all know it. You trade your peace of mind, sleep, and sometimes personal freedom (hello, “don’t go beyond cell signal” life). And I agree with many of you—it shouldn’t be this way.

We’ve seen teams turn their on-call rotations into something way more humane. Not perfect (nothing in ops is, let’s be real), but sustainable.

At Zenduty, we work with a lot of SREs, DevOps folks, and incident commanders who’ve said, “We can’t keep doing this.” So they started rethinking on-call. One of our partners cut their alert volume by 50%. Half! That’s not a magic trick. Just better processes, better tooling, and some good old-fashioned empathy for the humans behind the screens.

And if your team’s not giving you breathing room after an all-nighter? You deserve better. I’ll just say it.

I saw some of you mention how this stuff becomes political or gets deprioritized in favor of shiny new features. Ugh. I feel that in my bones. The best teams we’ve worked with treat incidents as opportunities to make things better. Every alert is basically your system saying “Help me, I’m tired.” And when you listen and fix it? Less 3 AM wake-ups. Win-win.

Anyway, I didn’t mean to ramble, but this topic is close to home. If you’re still stuck in on-call hell, or just want to vent about it. Always happy to swap war stories or chat about how folks are making on-call suck less.

Stay sane out there, Rohan DevRel @ Zenduty

[chgs]

Why don’t you have shift work?