Successful technologists understand that the ability to learn new domains is as equally important as having subject matter expertise in a single domain. Breadth is as important as depth. Competent software engineers can often move around laterally within an organization because of their ability to learn. They can also move upwards while still maintaining technical competence. That’s because certain principles such as systems analysis and design are technology agnostic. But when it comes to hardware, it becomes antiquated just as quickly as it becomes popular.
If you’re not old enough to remember Handspring’s PalmPilot, you certainly won’t remember the humble pager. Still used by the majority of hospital staff, pagers were once the Bat Signal for everyone from utility workers to IT techs when storms knocked down power lines or a company’s homepage crashed. Understanding the use case for pagers may come in handy when discussing today’s company – PagerDuty (PD).
In the fast-moving world of startups, software engineers are often responsible for doing everything, from writing code to managing their systems in production. A customer support call can often be followed by a bug fix and a “please try again” response to a flagship customer. That meant being on “pager duty” to respond to an IT issue 24/7. Inspired by an internal software tool at Ama