How to Survive Your First On-Call Rotation as a Software Engineer

Me on my first on-call rotation — “Everything is fine, everything is fine”

I had been a software engineer at my last company for about a month when my manager let me know I’d be going on-call during the next rotation. “Cool” I replied. Not cool.

I installed PagerDuty, a popular app that is as necessary as it is hated, to alert me when any critical ticket was created. I had casually been keeping tabs on the kinds of bugs that…