On call duty doesn’t have to be a burden. It can be quite the career accelerator in software engineering. Here’s 4 reasons why y’all might want to embrace those midnight alerts.

1. Deepen Your Understanding of the Entire System

When you’re on call, you’re exposed to parts of the system you might not interact with during your daily routine. This exposure strengthens your ability to troubleshoot effectively and contributes to a more robust system design.

2. Enhance Cross-Functional Collaboration

Incidents often require coordination with alot of different stakeholders: product managers, customer support, devops, etc. All of this interaction sharpens your communication skills and fosters a collaborative environment, which is key for swift incident resolution.

3. Cultivate a Mindset for Resilient Coding

Experiencing real life fires just reinforces the importance of writing resilient, fault-tolerant code. It instills a proactive approach to anticipate potential failures. And drives home the need to design systems that can gracefully handle unexpected issues.

4. Build Strong Partnerships with SREs

Collaborating with site reliability engineers during incidents creates great partnerships. SREs bring specialized expertise in system reliability, monitoring, and performance optimization. By working alongside these folks during incidents, you’ll gain insights into observability best practices and develop a shared understanding of your company’s reliability needs. These partnerships often lead to better architectural decisions long before any incident occurs.

So, being on call isn’t just about responding to late night alerts, it’s a great experience that fosters growth and resilience. It’s an opportunity to grow as an engineer and contribute to building reliable systems at scale.