Eight months into my first real job and I just got added to the on-call rotation. The idea of a page going off at 2am for a system I only half understand is already keeping me up.
What if I make it worse? What if I can't figure it out and have to wake someone senior? For those who've been on-call a while — what do you wish someone had told you before your first rotation? Does the dread fade?
The terror is normal and it fades after your first couple of real pages. Two things that helped me: (1) skim the runbooks before your shift so you know where things live, and (2) remember escalating is not failing — waking a senior at 3am for something genuinely broken is literally what the rotation is for. Nobody expects you to solo-fix everything on week one.
The dread absolutely fades. Two things that helped my first rotation: read past incidents/runbooks before you're on so nothing is fully new, and remember that waking a senior at 2am isn't failure — it's literally what the escalation path is FOR. Nobody expects you to solo a Sev1 in month eight.
