Please share a few words on what size company you work for, and what size team you’re apart of. If you’d like to share, mention how often you’re paged or activated!
Ask HN: How often are you on call?
1–10 of 46 posts
Re: Ask HN: How often are you on call?
#2One week out of two, for a company size of 20.
Re: Ask HN: How often are you on call?
#3Company the size of about 10.
I am the only person on call 24/7.
Re: Ask HN: How often are you on call?
#4once every 5 weeks, FAANG
Re: Ask HN: How often are you on call?
#5It depends on how many people we have on the team! Right now it’s every three weeks. A while ago it was every 6 weeks.
I used to get paged dozens of times a week. Now it’s either once a week, or a few dozen times a week (usually this is a blip that can just be ignored because something went wrong and then fixed itself). Typically there’s one small actionable item every week I’m on call.
The company is 500 people, my team varies in size a lot as people quit and we try and hire replacements. It’s been as small as 3 and as big as 12.
Re: Ask HN: How often are you on call?
#6I’d also be interested if people could add if being on call is (a) voluntary, or (b) required on their team.
Also, it’d be good to know if on call comes with additional compensation?
Re: Ask HN: How often are you on call?
#7[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: How often are you on call?
#8Large cross-site team. We do 12x4/12x3 rotations (Mon-Thu, Fri-Sun) so everyone stays fresh.
I've heard others are trying one-day rotations to make scheduling holidays fairer and more flexible for people who have commitments on certain days.
Re: Ask HN: How often are you on call?
#9Small startup, tech team of about 10 (2 SREs + 7 devs + 1 biz, total company size is 20, fully remote distributed across 3 continents), roughly 8 hours twice a week and only during my local timezone business hours, then the same 8 hours in one weekend day every two weeks, also roughly. We have lots of automated checks and alerts and only react to critical ones paging us via Slack (most of the alerts that page us are known, some are flaky some are false positives we can't ignore).
It was kind of forced on everybody (prematurely IMHO) but respecting people's timezones and business hours was key to make it acceptable and you can take the next day off no-questions-asked if you were on call on a weekend day even if you didn't have to act on anything. It's far from ideal considering how we still react to the critical alerts and what in them usually triggers actual on-call support but I've had worse in the past so it's alright... for now.
Re: Ask HN: How often are you on call?
#10Currently contracting for a ~10 person company.
In the past I've mostly worked at small companies and have never officially been on call. I've fixed the odd out of hours issue here and there without there being a proper arrangement.
The systems I work on (trading / betting software) are such that by the time you're through testing it's very rare to hit a game breaking issue because there's a very large incentive to not like, lose the bank.
Dependencies in the critical path are kept to a minimum, etc.
Usually problems are more 'soft', like an API being turned off or changed or something.