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Developer on Call

henrikwarne.com

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Re: Developer on Call

#191

Post by jasonlotito »

Verdex_3 wrote: post #136
re-actor wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So push the burden onto somebody else? Why aren't they allowed to "be busying living [their] life"?

They should be free to live their life. If it turns out that the company doesn't actually have enough money to hire enough people to perform all of the duties that it needs to continue to exist, then that company should cease to exist. Which is desirable over the alternative of having rich company owners externalize their failure to run their company adequately by stealing the lives of employees who don't have the ab…

> They should be free to live their life.

How does an on-call rotation prevent this?

Re: Developer on Call

#192

Post by user68858788 »

wink wrote: post #89
jpalomaki wrote: post #71

Kayak.com co-founder Paul English on this topic (2010): "The engineers and I handle customer support. When I tell people that, they look at me like I'm smoking crack. They say, "Why would you pay an engineer $150,000 to answer phones when you could pay someone in Arizona $8 an hour?" If you make the engineers answer e-mails and phone calls from the customers, the second or third time they get the same question, they'…

This sounds so nice in theory. All those pesky developers refusing to fix their horrible code. While in reality at least in my experience the developer would be very much happy to fix the code, it's just that you don't get any time to do that. It's only new features and new products.

I've worked as a developer oncall, and as dedicated support engineer oncall. You're absolutely right - management will absolutely refuse to allot time to improvements and bug fixes when there are features to make. It's frustrating being a Dev and knowing how to fix an issue, but not given the time to fix it. It's equally frustrating to cut tickets and mail reports on issues to see them sit forever in the backlog.

Re: Developer on Call

#193

Post by salmonfamine »

tigershark wrote: post #8

I have done it for 1 year and half and I’ll never, ever do it again. As I learnt, my sleep is worth much more than any amount of money.

How do you find non-on-call jobs? Seems like that’s just expected of devs these days. I have a very “chill” on-call policy but it still gives me a ton of anxiety.

Re: Developer on Call

#194

Post by watwut »

sdegutis wrote: post #162
tristor wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's actually more complex than that, even. I'm speaking from being an engineer for some time (~13 years) and a product manager now. The issue is that Customer A, B, C, D, and E want Feature A to behave in one way, and Customer N, M, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V want Feature A to behave in another way, and those two ways are mutually exclusive insofar as it can't merely be configurable, since Features B-F rely on Feature A…

> So which set of customers do you please? How do you ensure that customer requests for behavior changes, or customers being surprised by application behavior doesn't result in a scope creep that expands the requirements of your application to an unsustainable level? > How do you ensure that your business doesn't get coopted by BoM (Buckets of Money) to basically be a contract development house and eventual acquisiti…

That strategy would leave you with dozens and later hundreds of forks and variants. You need to make decision here and appoint product owner to make those decisions consistently.

Re: Developer on Call

#195

Post by rconti »

wink wrote: post #89
jpalomaki wrote: post #71

Kayak.com co-founder Paul English on this topic (2010): "The engineers and I handle customer support. When I tell people that, they look at me like I'm smoking crack. They say, "Why would you pay an engineer $150,000 to answer phones when you could pay someone in Arizona $8 an hour?" If you make the engineers answer e-mails and phone calls from the customers, the second or third time they get the same question, they'…

This sounds so nice in theory. All those pesky developers refusing to fix their horrible code. While in reality at least in my experience the developer would be very much happy to fix the code, it's just that you don't get any time to do that. It's only new features and new products.

I bet the developer's a lot happier to fix the code when the impact is more severe than yet another ticket.

Re: Developer on Call

#196

Post by rconti »

jedberg wrote: post #3

> Pay. People on call should get paid extra for it I've been on call for 20+ years. I've never gotten paid extra for it. I just figure it's baked into the normal paycheck. As long as everyone on the team is doing on call about the same amount, it doesn't really matter. At the end of the year, it usually works out pretty evenly. > Scheduling. When I have been on call, it has always been one week at a time, I agree wit…

I've been part of a formal on-call rotation in Ops departments at 3 companies, and only one of them actually compensated us specifically for it, and that was back in the 90s.

I like the idea of compensating by the week; seems like compensating per incident gives a bit of a perverse incentive.

Re: Developer on Call

#197

Post by rconti »

always_good wrote: post #18
tigershark wrote: post #8

I have done it for 1 year and half and I’ll never, ever do it again. As I learnt, my sleep is worth much more than any amount of money.

I think I have some lasting trauma for the year I was on call. I still have nightmares that I'm getting woken up into a hellish situation to fix code I've never seen at 3am. Or that I'm out on a date or having a beer or trying to enjoy my life when I get called. I remember the constant state of anxiety just knowing I could be called. Couldn't even wind down watching a movie much less read a book. I quit when I realiz…

Done it for at least 10 years, and I gotta say, as soon as I stopped, the anxiety MOSTLY went away.

That said, just the other day (after 18 months off), I twitched a bit when my text message notification went off.

And of course, it affects everyone differently.

Re: Developer on Call

#198

Post by minimidge »

_ah wrote: post #154
ken wrote: post #115

There's a lot of words, in the article and the comments, about being compensated for on-call time. The software field seems very anti-union, for reasons that I don't entirely understand. Protecting your time is one feature that unions offer. Want to be paid for every hour you're on call? Get the union to put it in their rules for employers. The alternative we have now is that each developer is responsible for negotia…

A union is a mechanism by which a class of people with less power (typically workers) pool together to enforce rules on people with more power (typically employers). Right now, software developers have LOTS OF POWER. Companies are constantly courting devs, offering very high salaries, and including incredible perks that simply aren't available in most other industries. Yes, some engineers are exploited, but on averag…

I’m not sure sure specifically which type of perks you’re referring to, but I’ve become increasingly cynical of a big chunk of perks offered tech companies. It seems a majority of them are there to keep you at the office longer and make you more dependent on the company. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, coffee, gym, ping pong table, snacks...

It’s fun and all, but I’d prefer more vacation time over a ping pong table and free dinner.

Re: Developer on Call

#199

Post by dreamdu5t »

If engineers fear being on call it means the software isn't properly engineered and development processes have failed. Because if a service is properly engineered to maintain availability, being on-call is a small burden because downtime is a rare occurrence.

However it's often the case that "on-call" means ship broken software and fix bugs after hours.

Re: Developer on Call

#200

Post by sdegutis »

watwut wrote: post #194
sdegutis wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So which set of customers do you please? How do you ensure that customer requests for behavior changes, or customers being surprised by application behavior doesn't result in a scope creep that expands the requirements of your application to an unsustainable level? > How do you ensure that your business doesn't get coopted by BoM (Buckets of Money) to basically be a contract development house and eventual acquisiti…

That strategy would leave you with dozens and later hundreds of forks and variants. You need to make decision here and appoint product owner to make those decisions consistently.

Extrapolating from Alan Perlis's quote, I think it's better to have 3 products that each do 1 thing well rather than to have 1 product that does 3 things very poorly.
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