A Savage Automation By A Sleepy On-Call Engineer
Today, everything is digitalized and billions of dollars are generated by various companies from a single website, per second. Because of this, the importance of a healthy website, zero downtime, and the actionable rapid force has increased.
Downtime, hardware failure, API failures, and software bugs are part of any development life cycle, which is understandable. How quickly engineers react to these downtimes is where they can really save companies a lot of money. To enable immediate response times, every company appoints an On-Call Engineer, who will get a call from a robot as soon as something goes wrong on the website.
The robot calls the on-call engineer and says, “There is an incident on your website. Press four to acknowledge.” The on-call person has to press four to acknowledge it and works on resolving the incident by calling other engineers to fix the issue. If they forget to press four, the call reaches their manager. If the manager also misses, then it moves on to the director. In this case, where the call is not acknowledged by the on-call person, they are the person to blame for anything that goes wrong. Because in the end, it results in a billion dollar loss per second for the company.
Now that you have the context I will tell you an interesting story about an on-call engineer, Mr. X, from company Y.
Mr. X was a very lazy person, and he liked to sleep. Sleeping was his hobby, and he became angry whenever anyone woke him up. Despite his laziness, he was still a great engineer. One day, he was called by the director of company Y and was given the responsibility of being an ‘On-Call’ person. Being a good engineer, Mr. X was excited about this new responsibility, but he had no idea what was coming next. Every day at 7:00 a.m., Mr. X started receiving calls from that annoying robot, and had to wake up and reply ‘4’ on his phone. To make matters worse, what irritated him most was that 99% of the alerts he received required no action, as it was falsely set up by other engineers. Since most of the alerts were non-actionable, his job essentially became merely pressing the number four over and over.
Tired of the sleepless nights over time, Mr. X laid down on the floor of his terrace and began cursing that robot. His mind was consumed with planning how to get his revenge, and he was searching for something on his Android mobile. Being an intelligent engineer, he found a way to cheat the system — to make a fool of that robot, and to make work easier for future generations. He found an app called MacroDroid.
He added two components to the app:
1. Trigger — when his action will be triggered. He wrote, “When the phone comes and adds regex to detect the phone number of the robot, the action should trigger.”
2. Action — what action to take. He created an action plan:
a) Pick up the phone.
b) Sleep for five seconds.
c) Press the dial-pad (added x, y coordinates).
d) Sleep for five seconds.
e) Press four (added x, y coordinates).
f) Cut the call.
Now whenever the robot calls him, the above automation gets triggered, four is automatically pressed, and 99% of problems are solved. He was the happiest man on earth, however…
1% of the problem still remains, and due to that, he is now searching for a new job!
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