$stdout - On-call
Lyrics below. The bane of the engineer's existence...ON-CALL!
Start off the week all hyped
Feeling real bright and optimistic
Like I’ma make everything right
Now that I’m here, yeah we’re gonna just fix s***
Couple dead jobs last night
Take a little peek like what the f*** is this
Retry two, one of em dies
Gotta debug, stacktrace for the lines
Go to the file and read
No red flags, looks fine to me
Run a git blame like who has context?
Last update was back in ‘03
Damn, ok, I see
Roll up my sleeves
Gotta go in, get past first glance
Really understand every line first hand
Hmmm, not bad
One hour later think I got a good plan
Start to write code, then I see a red badge
New runtime error in Slack going ham
F***, context switch
What’s up? Who broke this s***?
Looking through diffs that just got shipped
Found the bad one, revert, commit
Merge, and we’re good
No more fire, back to the dead job
Where was I? Oh right
Making a change, line 285
But I’m hungry and it’s lunchtime
I’ma go eat and put this aside
Seriously, like being on-call is not that bad guys
On-call, mucking, trucking through the mud in on-call
Stuck in f***ing on-call hell, might just make me say uncle
Don’t wish no on-call on y’all
On-call gon’ be my downfall
One day, we’re all on on-call
One day, we’re all on on-call
Back from lunch, munching on chips
Get in my flow, making progress quick
What’s this?
Customer support says a customer’s pissed
Context switch, ok…
This bug report is vague
Go to the app, open the page
Submit the form, then it should say…
“Error”, but I don’t see that
Tried a couple times and it went through
Even tried weird s*** to see what it’d do
I just cannot reproduce
Comment on ticket, close it
Back to my file that’s open
Can I just have a moment
To focus on what I’m coding
Type a little more get halfway in
Then a teammate sends me a DM
Like “can you hop in quick to this meeting?”
Context switch, now it’s 3PM
Damn, not much time left
It’s only day 1, and I'm already stressed
Can't make a dent and my energy’s spent
Can everyone leave me alone for a sec?
Another alert? I don't even know what this one's for
Can’t take it, rage quit, f*** this noise I’ma click ignore
Don’t Slack me, or tag me, don’t page me, don’t at me
I’ma do feature work instead
That dead job will just say dead
On-call, mucking, trucking through the mud in on-call
Stuck in f***ing on-call hell, might just make me say uncle
Don’t wish no on-call on y’all
On-call gon’ be my downfall
One day, we’re all on on-call
One day, we’re
We all get the call one day
When your day comes, hope that you’re okay
That your team comes through, and you step up too
So when they’re on-call they can call on you
Pray your pager don’t beep
So you get good sleep
Pray your family is good
And you hydrate, eat
Stop, wait, breathe
Repeat for the week
When you’re deep in the weeds hope you find what you need