Monitoring Work and the Path I Did Not Choose

There will be a reunion soon for a company I used to work for.

Apparently, not only the development members from back then will be there, but also people from partner companies who supported the same projects. Among them are people from the team that handled system monitoring.

Hearing that made me remember a few things from the past.

I Hated Late-Night Calls

Let me be honest.

Back then, I hated getting calls from the monitoring team.

They had done nothing wrong.

But when they called, it usually meant something had gone wrong.

Late at night.

On a holiday.

During the rare time when I had finally forgotten about work.

My phone would ring.

That familiar number would appear.

“Ah, there goes my day.”

That is what I would think as I picked up the phone.

I suspect many engineers have experienced this at least once.

Of course, there was no point in getting angry at them.

If anything, the monitoring team were the people organizing the situation and explaining what was happening.

That may be why, when we chose partner companies back then, I feel like we had a strange criterion.

Technical ability mattered, of course. But even more than that, we wanted people who were pleasant to talk to.

During an incident, talking to someone irritated or overbearing is genuinely exhausting.

Someone who calmly explains the situation is valuable just for that.

When I Was Young, I Did Not Choose Monitoring

One of my friends from my student days took a monitoring job as a new graduate.

I remember him laughing and saying, “When it is quiet, I just play games.”

At the time, I felt a little jealous.

On the other hand, I did not choose that path.

The reason was simple.

Money.

And career prospects.

I am not going to pretend otherwise.

When I was young, I thought design and development would lead to better pay than monitoring. And in reality, that was true.

For better or worse, the IT industry tends to value people who do difficult things more highly.

Building systems is valued more than monitoring them.

Designing systems is valued more than building them.

That is the kind of world it is.

So I went toward development.

Looking back now, I still do not think that choice was wrong.

Even if I could redo my life, I would probably choose the same path.

But I See It a Little Differently Now

When I was young, there was a part of me that looked down on monitoring work a little.

People who look at screens.

People who make phone calls when alerts go off.

That was about the level of my understanding.

But after being involved in operations for a long time, my view changed.

A system is not finished just because it has been built.

In fact, it usually lives much longer after it starts running.

And incidents do not care about our schedules. They happen as if they are deliberately aiming for the middle of the night or a holiday.

At those moments, the first people to detect something abnormal are the monitoring staff.

The developers are asleep.

The infrastructure engineers are asleep.

But someone is sitting at the monitoring desk.

When you think about it, that is not an easy job at all.

Still, I Could Not Do It

Having written all of that, though, I still do not think I am suited to it.

I think it is important work.

I think it is essential work.

But even if someone told me it paid the same as development, I probably would not do it.

I think I am simply bad at waiting.

I would rather build mechanisms that prevent abnormalities than watch for abnormalities to occur.

I would rather build a monitoring system than watch a monitoring screen.

This is not about which job is better. It is a matter of personality.

You can respect firefighters without wanting to become one yourself.

It feels similar to that.

What I Want to Ask at the Reunion

Many decades have passed since then.

I wonder what those monitoring team members are doing now.

Are they still doing monitoring work?

Did they move into operations design?

Or did they switch to infrastructure or development?

I am a little curious.

Back then, every time the phone rang, I thought, “Please, give me a break.”

But now I can at least imagine some of the difficulty on the other side of those calls.

At the reunion, I would like to talk about those old days, including that side of the story.

That said, if someone tells me, “We still have a job where the phone rings in the middle of the night. Want to join now?” I will refuse with everything I have.