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Random freezes, missing sound and display glitches usually trace back to one bad driver. Find and replace yours safely.Free scan · under a minuteEngineers are more likely to volunteer during an incident when ordinary management has helped them feel trusted, respected, and invested in the system. That is the argument Saqib Ameen Subhan makes in his essay on DEV Community: the response at 2 AM is shaped by what happens during the workday long before anything breaks. It is a management perspective, not a proven formula—and voluntary help must never become an assumed staffing plan.
What prompted the argument
Subhan describes a cloud-region outage during which engineers who were not on call joined the incident bridge voluntarily. He says recovery took thirty hours. That account is his anecdote and interpretation, not independently verified incident reporting or evidence of how engineers generally behave.
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He argues that the response reflected a sense of ownership cultivated before the outage. His essay puts it this way: “The 2 AM behaviour was decided months earlier, at 2 PM, when nothing was burning.” In other words, people’s willingness to help may depend on how they are treated during routine work—not merely on the incident itself.
Four everyday practices that can support ownership
Subhan identifies four ways managers can show respect and make ownership possible. They are recommendations from his essay, not interventions shown to guarantee a particular outcome.
Protect leave
Cross-train so work does not depend on a single person, and let the team coordinate its leave calendar. Vacation should be time off, not a period when someone is quietly expected to remain available for questions or emergencies.
Give public credit
Make engineers’ contributions visible to leadership, and give them the opportunity to present their own work. Recognition should identify who did the work rather than letting a manager absorb the credit.
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Share decisions
Include the people who will live with the consequences when deciding on tools, processes, or the on-call rota. Participation does not mean every decision must be unanimous; it means the affected engineers have a meaningful voice.
Treat people as people
Avoid reducing engineers to “resources” in meetings, plans, or management thinking. Respectful treatment is a daily practice, not a reward reserved for exceptional effort.
Voluntary help is not free capacity
The most important boundary in the essay is that a manager must not turn voluntary commitment into a staffing assumption. An engineer joining an incident outside their scheduled responsibility is offering extra help; that does not make their availability part of the rota or a substitute for adequate coverage.
Subhan’s proposed responses are practical: leaders should take the first burden at 2 AM, provide compensatory time off after incident nights without making people ask, and watch for the same engineer becoming the hero repeatedly. These are his recommendations, not a formal policy or a guarantee that any one practice will prevent burnout.
Repeated rescue by one person is a signal to examine the system—coverage, knowledge concentration, workload, and recovery time—not a reason to rely on that person more. The essay’s warning is that expecting a gift of extra effort can erode the trust that made someone willing to offer it.
Ownership is different from compliance
Subhan distinguishes attendance and hours from the feeling that a system is partly yours. As he writes, “You can buy attendance. You can buy hours, and with enough money you can even buy compliance.” His point is not that pay or scheduling do not matter; it is that they are different from voluntary investment in a shared system.
Best Value
That distinction matters in incident response. A rota defines who is obligated to respond; ownership may explain why someone outside it chooses to help. A healthy team can value that help without treating it as a dependable resource. Subhan calls the willingness “a gift” and warns: “Protect the gift and it compounds. Spend it and it is gone.”
What the essay does—and does not—establish
The essay offers a useful management lens, not a statistical finding. Its thirty-hour recovery belongs to one account, and it provides no quantitative study demonstrating that protected leave, public credit, shared decisions, or respectful language cause engineers to volunteer. Readers should take the practices as reasoned recommendations and assess them in the context of their own team, rather than as a universal causal model.
Source: Saqib Ameen Subhan, “You can buy attendance, You can buy hours, But the feeling that "this system is mine" is Not for Sale!”, DEV Community. The listing displays “Sep 30” without a visible year, so the publication year is not established.
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