31–40 of 64 posts
For those doing on-call and required to be responsive to alerts at all times during your shift, one thing to think about is your pay for this burden. Some cardiologists get over $3K/day to just be on-call (whether or not anything comes up) which means keeping within range of the hospital, being sober, not being more than a few minutes away from their phone, and so on. While generally nobody's life is on the line shou…
To software developers in this thread who are on-call; I'd like to share some thoughts with you. I've worked at places that do have on-call rotations and others that have none. I will no longer work at a company that requires me to be on-call. Why? It says a lot when a company doesn't put the effort into various forms of testing and QA to ensure that production software does not have critical issues that warrant at 2…
… whereas I'd conversely argue that volumes are also spoken when a company does not require its developers to be on-call. Often, those volumes are written with negative undertones and a narrative that speaks to developers not owning or understanding their software stack. Worse, in an exercise reminiscent of companies offering unlimited PTO, "not on-call," when read between the lines, could really mean "always on-call…
For those doing on-call and required to be responsive to alerts at all times during your shift, one thing to think about is your pay for this burden. Some cardiologists get over $3K/day to just be on-call (whether or not anything comes up) which means keeping within range of the hospital, being sober, not being more than a few minutes away from their phone, and so on. While generally nobody's life is on the line shou…
For those doing on-call and required to be responsive to alerts at all times during your shift, one thing to think about is your pay for this burden. Some cardiologists get over $3K/day to just be on-call (whether or not anything comes up) which means keeping within range of the hospital, being sober, not being more than a few minutes away from their phone, and so on. While generally nobody's life is on the line shou…
3k a day? do you have a source for that?
2) We get 3-4 alerts a year that have to be handled before the next business day.
3) As such, there is no real work priority, triage, etc. You resolve it immediately. There is no other priority. [ Any on-call event == lost money ]
> * how do you manage for other teams' risk? (ie their api goes down, you can't satisfy your customers)
Asynchronous processing. I buffer until their API is back up. I do this for literally dozens of companies from small manufacturers to Amazon.
There really isn't any other good way to handle it and if you need to do it otherwise that really is a fundamental architectural problem that should have been resolved at the design phase.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So, get a call at 2 AM on the weekend and design and implement a new feature, release to production to debug and test. Oh no... just no. Production is not where debugging and testing should ever happen, obviously. If that's what your company expects I'm not surprised QA was let go when your customers are doing it for you. This makes me sad.
>Oh no... just no. Production is not where debugging and testing should ever happen. Debugging sure. Testing in production however is incredibly valuable.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
3k a day? do you have a source for that?
Appears to be less than 3k/day on average. Source: http://www.acep.org/Clinical---Practice-Management/Survey--M...
While the numbers may be off, one point I didn't make in my initial post but should have is that anybody doing on-call is providing a valuable service. It's no different than paying a babysitter to watch TV while your kids sleep. Both babysitters and devops/IT/whatever are compensated for their ability to act in case the unexpected happens. If someone's not getting paid for that, then it must not be valuable to the company to have that coverage.
To software developers in this thread who are on-call; I'd like to share some thoughts with you. I've worked at places that do have on-call rotations and others that have none. I will no longer work at a company that requires me to be on-call. Why? It says a lot when a company doesn't put the effort into various forms of testing and QA to ensure that production software does not have critical issues that warrant at 2…
… whereas I'd conversely argue that volumes are also spoken when a company does not require its developers to be on-call. Often, those volumes are written with negative undertones and a narrative that speaks to developers not owning or understanding their software stack. Worse, in an exercise reminiscent of companies offering unlimited PTO, "not on-call," when read between the lines, could really mean "always on-call…
What I actually wanted to say from all this however, is that despite the truth of your argument, I'd take a third angle. No on call is bad, but similarly, _unpaid_ OT is bad. The common rhetoric from this soapbox is that if employers are accountable for this time, it'll incentivise them to have processes and hold values that don't abuse an expensive resource. If something is on fire; the on call employee still _will be there to handle it_, but the fact that it's become a pro-bono assumed part of many of our jobs in the tech sector is the part I take issue with more than doing the task itself.
For those doing on-call and required to be responsive to alerts at all times during your shift, one thing to think about is your pay for this burden. Some cardiologists get over $3K/day to just be on-call (whether or not anything comes up) which means keeping within range of the hospital, being sober, not being more than a few minutes away from their phone, and so on. While generally nobody's life is on the line shou…
I agree 100%
My last company is notorious for official-unofficial on call duties.
You must remain within 30 minutes of the office, be near your cell phone and sober, 24x7. Because there is no official policy, there was no rotation, so technically I was always on call. Their official stance on compensation is that salaried employees can't get overtime, and it's covered by the annual bonus anyway. Yep, unlimited on-call & overtime covered by a ~7% bonus that pays out about 50% of the time.
I was once out of the country on a statutory holiday and didn't answer my personal cell phone (roaming would have killed me), which caused me to get reprimanded and lose my bonus for the entire year.
After some back and forward I quit soon after.