“You have no problem with out of hours work, right?”
It’s that question during the interview that causes a knot in your stomach. You hope, even pray, that what they mean is the occasional bit of emergency response work or a crunch period at a critical part of a project, both of which you have no issue with. But after you accept that job you find out that the work is routine system maintenance.
I’m going to put forward the argument that in this, dare I say it, golden age of automation, continuous deployment, commodity hardware, virtualisation, micro-services and other cloud-related fluff that there is very few situations why this work needs to be done out of hours. If anything using this model incurs additional risk.
(To any prospective employers out there, don’t take this as my refusal to do such work, this piece is simply about thinking about the issue differently)