Being on-call is one of the most discussed and challenging aspects of a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) role, but whether it is the "worst" part depends on the team culture, system maturity, and how the on-call process is managed. On-call responsibility is an important part of SRE because it ensures that production systems remain reliable, available, and quickly recover from incidents.
Many SREs find on-call challenging because it can interrupt personal time, create pressure during unexpected incidents, and require quick decision-making during critical situations. The biggest frustration is often not the incident itself but poor alerting systems, excessive notifications, unclear ownership, and repeated issues that are not permanently fixed. Community discussions often highlight that alert noise and disruption to daily life are among the most difficult parts of being on-call.
However, on-call is not always a negative experience. It provides SREs with valuable opportunities to understand real production problems, improve system reliability, and develop strong troubleshooting skills. Handling incidents helps engineers identify weaknesses in architecture, monitoring, automation, and deployment processes.
A healthy SRE on-call culture usually includes:
- Well-defined on-call rotations to distribute responsibility fairly
- Clear escalation processes
- Actionable alerts instead of unnecessary notifications
- Proper documentation and runbooks
- Automation to reduce repetitive operational tasks
- Blameless post-incident reviews to prevent future failures
Organizations that invest in reliability practices can make on-call less stressful and more productive. The goal of SRE is not just to respond to failures but to learn from them and build systems that fail less often over time. ([Google SRE][3])
In my opinion, being on-call itself is not the worst part of SRE. The real problem is an unhealthy on-call environment where engineers constantly deal with unresolved issues, poor monitoring, and excessive workload. When managed properly, on-call becomes an opportunity for learning, ownership, and improving the overall reliability of applications.
Ultimately, successful SRE teams treat on-call as a shared responsibility rather than a burden placed on individuals. A well-designed process can transform on-call from a stressful obligation into an essential part of building stable and scalable systems.