Imagine losing sleep over a corporate problem where you're just the next Joe Engineer, to be fired the second you're not needed. Have some perspective people.
I'm confused, why isn't being fired something to lose sleep over in your eyes?
I get that you're implying that the job itself is not worth that much concern, but it seems you're ignoring that jobs bring in income, pay your mortgage, etc.
People rarely get fired for outages. The comment you are replying to is saying that engineers shouldn’t stress out over an outage that only impacts a corporation.
It’s a commentary on work / life balance and the all-too-common phenomenon of employees sacrificing for a company (in this case, feeling such personal stress that they would lose sleep) and contrasting it with the fact that most employers will fire you without a second thought if it’s what’s best for the business (they won’t lose any sleep).
It’s a critique of the asymmetry that often exists and is frequently exploited by companies. This is often seen in statements like, “we are one big family so put in a few more hours for this launch” coupled with announcements like, “profit projections didn’t meet expectations so we are downsizing 5% of the work force.” You are family when they need you to work hard, and an expendable free market agent when your continued employment might risk hitting the quarterly goal.
It is, of course, reasonable to lose sleep if you think your employment is in jeopardy. Very few companies, especially in the competitive SV market are firing engineers because of a single outage, even a bad one, because you just paid a bunch of money to train those engineers how to see this coming and fix it.
