The Other Side of On-Call
The article discusses the often-overlooked challenges engineers face while on-call, particularly when they are responsible for critical bugs. It highlights personal experiences of the author, including incidents at Twitter and Mixpanel, where mistakes led to significant consequences but ultimately did not result in catastrophic outcomes. The piece emphasizes the importance of effective safeguards and the misconception that more process equates to better safety in engineering.
- ▪The author shares personal experiences of being on-call and facing critical bugs.
- ▪Incidents at Twitter and Mixpanel illustrate the fear of catastrophic outcomes that often do not materialize.
- ▪The article argues that effective safeguards and capabilities are more important than excessive processes.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
The Other Side of On-CallAniruddhaMay 25, 2026ShareLast week I read this post by Yao on being on-call and I couldn't agree more! The best engineers are also the best debuggers, and vice versa. But there's another side to on-call that rarely gets written about: the times when the bug isn't somebody else's, it's yours. The part nobody talks about is the conviction, in the moment, that you've just ended your career, or worse, your company.I joined Twitter right out of grad school. In my first few weeks I was tasked with running a load test for a new graph store. The load test ran fine. It also caused a SEV0 that took down our observability stack, leaving the whole company running blind. I sat at my desk for an hour genuinely calculating which friends to call about a new job.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Hacker News (Newest).
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