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What does "on-call" mean in programming?
on-call is one of the most common terms in software development. This guide explains what it means, how it is used in practice, and why it matters, with real examples from the developer world.
Definition
A rotation where engineers are designated to respond to production incidents outside normal working hours. The on-call engineer carries a pager (or receives alerts on their phone) and is expected to respond within minutes. Most teams rotate on-call duty weekly.
Example
"I am on-call this week. I got paged at 2am because the payment service was returning 503s."
Related terms
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