I am the primary employee on-call this week. What does this mean? This means I am responsible for replying to the following avenues of inquiry from our business customers and parters:
1. E-mail list.
2. Legacy web forum.
3. New web forum.
4. Business support inquiries.
5. Support engineer inquiries.
6. My personal favorite, escalated phone call inquiries.
I get paid for being on-call. This is the benefit to being on call.
What is the downside?
1. Being responsible for support on systems with which I am unfamiliar. The support model is the blind leading the blind from a certain perspective.
2. Being the last line of defense for support. The majority of support engineers day-to-day responsibilities involve understanding the entire solution or at least trying to reach that goal. My day-to-day goal involves being an expert on a small handful of subcomponents within one product of the solution. The support engineers are better suited and knowledgable about the product as a whole. Blame this on my responsibilities or lack of training but this is the awful truth. In fairness, I can bend the idea of being on-call to support to being on-call to manage support. I am just a middleman to find the correct people who do know.
3. Blurring of work-life boundaries. This is a big issue for me and one of the most important things I look for in terms of job satisfaction. When the lines are blurred between work time and personal time, the term job blurs into indentured servitude.
From an reasoned perspective, I understand the idea for being on-call (to support customers and also so other employees don't have to do it more frequently). From an emotional standpoint, it pains me.
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2 weeks ago
1 comment:
You have my sympathies. I've come to the conclusion that no matter how interesting a particular job is, I still need a fair amount of private time in order to keep myself from going insane. I honestly cannot fathom the mental/emotional processes of those people who live to work, so to speak, rather than work to live.
The only job I could possibly think of that I would enjoy enough to not care if it cut into my free time might be composing music, or possibly writing (something involving some sort of creative expression -- and no, translation doesn't really count.) Sadly, it's highly unlikely that I will ever have the skills to pursue either of these professionally...not that that'll stop me from trying.
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