> I've been a parent since I was 18 and I have 4 kids. I don't say that lightly.

Now, /that/ is impressive. I mean, yeah, I'm not impressed by the pager. I've been on pager more often than not from 17 onward. But, I don't have kids, and my significant other is also technical, also works a lot and is super understanding. (well, and it's really only been the last five years or so that I had a relationship I cared about more than my servers, anyhow. Maybe less than that. I like my servers a lot. and I think there is a trial period for partners.) - I mean, that's the hard part about pager for most people; "hey honey, I've gotta stop paying attention to you, bring out the laptop and fix something real quick" and that isn't all that much of a problem for me. I've never really been a 'planner' so getting high priority interrupts isn't a huge problem.

but yeah. juggling that /and/ kids would be tough. well, kids in general would be tough.

eh, have you ever been the only technical guy at a company? I think it's a pretty similar experience. Either way; being a sole founder, and being the only tech guy at a company is way easier (assuming you have the skills and power to fix the system so that you don't get paged more than once a week) than being on pager on a giant and seriously broken cluster for other people.

I've worked other places where the pager went off three times an hour. Sure, you only had one week out of four, and only 12 hours a day, but if you fucked up even a little bit, the company would lose hundreds of thousands of dollars. It was a completely insane situation, and completely broken, as it should have been pretty easy to automate most of what we did. (most of what we did was telling the cluster 'okay, don't use that node, it's broken') Now, why didn't we fix it? I dono. there were some sharp folks there. Maybe we were all too burnt out from pager? maybe it was internal resistance to just throwing nodes back to our (really shitty) burn-in routine? (I mean, the idea was you were supposed to log in to the broken node and troubleshoot rather than just pulling it. But realistically, you only did that for the first day or two.) In the end, most of us ended up leaving.

This was the only pager that has phased me. Out of being on pager more often than not more than 20 years (well, uh, I guess it was closer to 15 years at that time) that was the only job where the pager broke me. Really, that was the only job where the pager bothered me much at all.

But yeah, compared to that? being a single founder is super easy. I get to make all the decisions, so I can choose things that break less. I can take all the shortcuts I like, and avoid the shortcuts I don't like. If the system is unreliable, it's completely my fault. If I want to take a pay cut so that I can hire someone else to lighten the load? my decision.

I mean, it's kinda like being the only tech guy at a small company, but you have a whole heck of a lot more power, so you can make decisions like hiring a customer out of IRC to help you out, which the boss almost never approves.

>I've also been on pager duty before. But being the only person responsible for keeping a critical system running for years on end is an order of magnitude or two worse than standard page duty I've ever done. I should add, our business is very seasonal and very unpredictable.

I guess my main point is that normal pager (when you are the only/head sysadmin) has all the responsibilities of being the single founder on pager, with a whole lot less power to fix the root cause of those pages. Being the new guy in a large organization usually gets you a little bit less responsibility, (not all that much less if you've sold yourself as some kind of super-expert sysadmin, or at least, that's how I felt.) but very little power to actually fix root causes.

Personally, I think the power to fix the root cause makes the job incredibly easier, and incredibly more interesting and satisfying. Otherwise it feels like you are just playing whack-a-mole with the problems. Nothing bothers me quite as much as fixing a problem without knowing how I fixed it.