#80 On-Call Engineering: How to bring calm to the chaos -...

What this episode covers

What does it really feel like to be the person who gets paged when everything breaks?In this episode, we sit down with Rachel to talk about the reality of on-call engineering — the stress, the uncertainty, the sleepless nights, and the systems that can turn chaos into calm. From false alarms at 3 a.m. to high-pressure incidents with real business impact, Rachel shares honest stories, hard-earned lessons, and practical ways teams can make on-call more sustainable.We explore what good incident management actually looks like, why alert fatigue is so dangerous, how strong escalation paths and runbooks reduce panic, and why psychological safety matters just as much as technical skill. We also talk about postmortems, monitoring, ownership, and how on-call can become one of the fastest ways to truly understand the systems you build.Whether you love on-call, fear it, or are still figuring out if it is for you, this conversation is full of relatable moments, useful insights, and real-world advice for bringing more calm to operational chaos.ABOUT RACHELRachel joined 1KOMMA5° three years ago as a backend engineer and has since soft-launched into engineering management. She cares a lot about what drives people, making an actual difference, and solving tricky problems—usually in that order.CHAPTERS(00:00) Introduction to On-Call Engineering(01:40) Why On-Call Can Be So Challenging(03:50) The Biggest Stress Factors in On-Call(06:16) How Teams Communicate During Incidents(08:27) The Performance Cost of Sleep Deprivation(10:46) Why Downtime Is So Expensive(13:25) Our Worst On-Call Stories(18:58) Hard Lessons from Real Incidents(21:57) Alerts, Noise, and Incident Management(30:22) How 1K5 Improved Its On-Call Process(38:14) Smarter Documentation and Better Postmortems(41:11) Incident Transcription and Team Communication(43:32) Managing Risk and Building Psychological Safety(46:21) Life as an On-Call Engineer(49:39) What Makes a Postmortem Useful?(56:46) Final Reflections on On-Call and TeamworkLINKShttps://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2656292https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_deprivation

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What does it really feel like to be the person who gets paged when everything breaks?In this episode, we sit down with Rachel to talk about the reality of on-call engineering — the stress, the uncertainty, the sleepless nights, and the systems that...

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