No On-Call Rotations: Bending Spoons aims to build systems so reliable that they eliminate the need for on-call rotations. This is unusual in the tech industry, where on-call duties are standard to promptly address system issues.
For most of their products, they have no on-call schemes at all. Engineers are encouraged to think through all corner cases to ensure robustness, knowing there is no fallback like an on-call team.
Seems reasonable if they're putting most of their acquisitions into maintenance mode. In my experience the vast majority of outages are caused by bad deploys of new code or configuration.
I wonder if that's got lost in translation somewhere. I can understand not having on-call operations teams (an anti-pattern) but not having anyone on call at any time seems unlikely. Unless they mean to say its part of all devs job expectations and not a paid extra.
I don't want to imply Bending Spoons is this awesome, as I know nothing much about them (except that they named their company after a weird scam, lol), but there's a pretty reasonable principle that might apply here:
If our service goes down for any reason, uh... wait until Monday afternoon, then try again. (Sorry!)
Considering AOL's business model was to keep old folks paying for dialup, and once they moved off of dialup continue paying for access to the AOL portal, a good chunk of their user base may already be dead and still being billed.
>but not having anyone on call at any time seems unlikely.
Bending Spoons is Milan based and most of Europe has very strong right-to-disconnect laws. It's not really uncommon here to not have anyone on call unless you're some big multinational.
All companies I've worked at had (paid) on-call set up. The right to disconnect isn't incompatible with business needs and the law contemplates it. Also, nurses and doctors do it too.
Is anyone surprised that you can build stuff that require no support for years? I do, know people that do. Thinking about robustness is the default path.
"We are looking for a person who has an unavoidable priority, where their current options are insufficient or unworkable. This person would be weird not to buy our product."
So in other words, a market need or underserved niche.
I guess they mean you need to identify specific people, at a specific place and time, who are desperate for a solution to some problem.
They are desperate usually because it is a problem that affects their bottom line, prevents them completing a project at work, wastes an enormous amount of their time when doing something important to them, etc.
It must be a solution that, even when distilled to its very core, provides clear value to specific people you can identify. Just lighting on a vague market need or undeserved niche is not enough.
Not to say even purely passion projects can't succeed, but those are more hit-or-miss.
It sounds difficult to make a definitive statement based on the findings of the referenced paper:
"Overall, the vitamin content of the frozen commodities was comparable to and occasionally higher than that of their fresh counterparts. β-Carotene, however, was found to decrease drastically in some commodities."
And again, none of it ever happened and it is a work of fiction. It is warning of what might happen, it is a political point author is making.
But, none of that stuff happened. It is not how real world oppressions play out in real world. And that is not even criticism, I like that book a lot. I just dont treat it as something factual.
https://www.colinkeeley.com/blog/bending-spoons-operating-ma...
I enjoyed this part:
No On-Call Rotations: Bending Spoons aims to build systems so reliable that they eliminate the need for on-call rotations. This is unusual in the tech industry, where on-call duties are standard to promptly address system issues.
For most of their products, they have no on-call schemes at all. Engineers are encouraged to think through all corner cases to ensure robustness, knowing there is no fallback like an on-call team.