On-call never shows up in exit interviews. But across half a dozen consulting engagements, I've watched it quietly hollow out engineering teams. The pattern is always the same, and it's always fixable.
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Hello, I'm Luke
Applied AI architecture, agent harnesses, and notes from getting AI systems into production.
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- Every 30 minutes, the auth server spiked to 100% CPU and shed requests. The pattern was so regular you could set a watch by it. Turned out every user's JWT expired at the same time.
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- Every deploy dropped a handful of requests. The service had a SIGTERM handler. It just didn't do what anyone thought it did.
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- A client's React class-to-hooks migration had been "90% complete" for fourteen months. The last 10% contained every hard problem the team had been avoiding. Gradual migrations don't fail at the start — they fail when nobody decides to finish.
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- A critical notification service was processing 50,000 messages a day. When it started silently dropping SMS, it took a week for anyone to notice — because the alerts were going to a Slack channel that belonged to a team that no longer existed.
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