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Ask HN: Does your on-call rotation suck? Can I join it?

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Re: Ask HN: Does your on-call rotation suck? Can I join it?

#21

Post by ferguess_k »

arcfour wrote: post #16
dgunay wrote: post #15

I'm certainly not at liberty to invite a random to cover on-call shifts for us, but here's some anecdata about things I've witness that made on-call suck. We began with free food delivery over the weekend, and the expectation that you'd take a day off the next week ("unlimited" PTO policy). Eventually they stopped letting us do that and now the "unlimited" in our PTO policy has an invisible limit, so you can't actual…

I wonder what would happen if you sent this nearly verbatim to executive leadership. It is quite a thorough, candid description of a serious problem. At least I certainly wouldn't be happy to learn that my product was bursting at the seams and nobody was being held accountable. But I'm not an executive leader. (Maybe that's why?)

It probably doesn't worth it, considering it might impact the replier's career negatively. I'd never do that. I'd speak to my manager and if he just gets by then I just get by.

Re: Ask HN: Does your on-call rotation suck? Can I join it?

#22

Post by andrewmcwatters »

asciifree wrote: post #13
andrewmcwatters wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you're allocated the time for on-call, salaried for it, but never assigned the task to fix the damn thing. So instead, you and your team burn maybe-I-have-to-get-up-at-night-time instead of definitely-attempting-to-fix-it-time.

I strongly believe whoever is on-call should have free reign to modify anything about their ops environment. The pitch for management is that while in the short term it might take time away from project work, eventually the reduction in interruptions will result in higher productivity. p.s. Knew I recognised the name - loved following development of Planimeter/Grid a while ago!

Thank you so much! My company is shipping a finance platform at the moment, and I’d love to get back to Planimeter’s work when I am able.

Re: Ask HN: Does your on-call rotation suck? Can I join it?

#23

Post by dgunay »

arcfour wrote: post #16
dgunay wrote: post #15

I'm certainly not at liberty to invite a random to cover on-call shifts for us, but here's some anecdata about things I've witness that made on-call suck. We began with free food delivery over the weekend, and the expectation that you'd take a day off the next week ("unlimited" PTO policy). Eventually they stopped letting us do that and now the "unlimited" in our PTO policy has an invisible limit, so you can't actual…

I wonder what would happen if you sent this nearly verbatim to executive leadership. It is quite a thorough, candid description of a serious problem. At least I certainly wouldn't be happy to learn that my product was bursting at the seams and nobody was being held accountable. But I'm not an executive leader. (Maybe that's why?)

All of these issues were at some point raised to leadership. I've spent a lot of political capital on the issue and decided that it's not a hill I'm prepared to die on. Either a crop of new hires will come along and improve the situation with their fresh-eyed optimism, or it'll just keep happening and I'll try to remain zen.

And there's certainly a calculus to it that changes when you're an executive. To me, craftsmanship, diligence, and engineering excellence are important, not just because I love programming but also because I'm an IC and it affects me directly. To an executive, I am just some weird nerd they have to pay a lot of money to make computers do things. Beautiful code and a serene on-call experience are nice but they don't usually get a company acquired.

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