Being On Call Taught Me More Than Any Coding Bootcamp

Bootcamps prepare you for interviews, but being on call prepares you for reality.

Being On Call Taught Me More Than Any Coding Bootcamp

Bootcamps prepare you for interviews, but being on call prepares you for reality.

The Hard Truth First

Bootcamps teach you how to write code.
Being on call teaches you why that code really matters.

You can memorise all the syntax, master every framework, and build shiny projects.
But nothing humbles and grows you faster than being the person responsible when your code breaks at 2:00 AM. I know this can be frustrating, losing your sleep just because of some stupid bug. I have gone through that frustration of

“I just solved one and now there is whole queue… ughhhh….”

That’s when you stop coding to impress and start coding to survive. Fixing the bug in production is the priority, and everything else is secondary.

Sometimes you’re just running behind a stupid and unnecessary bug which is not even necessary to solve, and you realise this after 48 hours of chasing and solving it.

My First On-Call Incident

The alert hit my phone like a panic attack.
“High latency on /api/orders. Timeout threshold exceeded.”
I froze. I’d written that endpoint. I knew it was fragile, but I’d shipped it anyway, assuming everything would be fine after doing some rounds of testing.

Within 10 minutes, a client was on Teams asking what was happening. My teammates were pinging logs, and the system was slowing to a crawl. Since the site is crashing and the major thing that is getting impacted is our revenue.

It was panic and chaos that was the night when I stopped being “just a frontend dev” and became someone who owned their code.

What On Call Taught Me That A Bootcamp May Never Will

1. Code is not the final product — reliability is.

Nobody cares how elegant your code looks if it crashes under real usage. Being on call teaches you to optimise for stability, not cleverness.

2. Logs are your lifeline.

Debugging in production isn’t about console.log(). It’s about writing logs before things break — with context that helps your future self fix things fast.

3. Edge cases aren’t edge — they’re inevitable.

That “won’t happen often” scenario? It will. And it will wake you up.
On-call teaches you to think like a pessimist, because systems fail in unexpected ways. You might test all cases, but might miss some of them also, and that’s where try catch saves your life.

4. Alerts need empathy.

Every alert is a human problem disguised as a system issue. Bad alerts ruin weekends. Good ones help prevent disasters early. Don’t be afraid of them. As a Good developer, your job is not only to write good code but also to solve these issues.

5. Being Calm is a skill.

In the heat of a fire, nobody’s looking for a genius. They’re looking for someone who can breathe, break down the problem, and communicate clearly. I know that it can sometimes feel a lot of pressure, especially in the beginning when you just start to be on call.

Tip — Don’t rush out to solve the bugs, breathe. If you need help, ask your seniors and once you’re comfortable. You can do it.

How On-Call Changes How You Code Forever

Once you’ve been on call, you never look at your PRs the same way again.

You start:

Adding meaningful logs before merging
Writing cleaner, rollback-safe deployments
Designing for understandability, not just performance
Thinking about real users — and what happens when things go wrong

Bootcamps teach you how to get a job.
On-call teaches you how to keep one — and grow in it.

Why You Should Try It (At Least Once)

Even if you’re early in your career, don’t avoid on-call duty — embrace it. It’s the fastest way to:

Build empathy for ops, support, and customers
Level up your debugging and system thinking
Get noticed as someone who takes real responsibility

Yes, it’s uncomfortable.

But growth doesn’t happen in your comfort zone — it happens when you’re in the trenches, solving real problems.

Being On Call Taught Me More Than Any Coding Bootcamp