Ask HN: How often are you on call?

I'm on call 24/7. It's fairly normal to wake up at 2 am because there's a pressing situation and a client is in need. That said, I actively chose this situation for myself and find it to be pretty rewarding. Of course, it requires some planning and coordination, so my team divvied up our responsibilities accordingly to ensure that there are always resources available for taking meetings on a normal schedule.

It's probably worth noting, we work with large brands and marketing agencies from all around the world and are often called upon to 'save the day' once someone's plans have fallen through. As a result, time is usually the one thing our clients don't have enough of and being able to solve their problems ASAP is what allows our clients to get back to normal operation. Given that, it's easy for me to pick up the phone at 2 am because I know that whoever is calling me is going to be having a worse time than I am.

Large company. Team of 12. Do very specialized work.

On call: Never and never have been in 25+ years across multiple large tech companies.

Seriously considered looking into a job at Facebook where this would have been required and it was definitely one of the considerations that made that position very unappealing.

Never, and I don't consider any job that demands this. Learn what work-life separation means.

I'm at the complete opposite of the spectrum there, on-call 24/7/365. Then again partially own the company and enjoy my colleagues. If I go dark for a few days answering non-urgent queries no one questions it because they know I wake up at 3am and put out digital fires within short timeframes. Life and balance are just words in the end, you can clock off at exactly 5pm to the nanosecond and still not find that holy grail ever. It is what you make it.

tl;dr One week out of four.

I’m an SRE on a team of 4 (incl manager). The company is about 140 people. Each of my team members participates in on-call (incl manager) and is on for a week at a time. We’ve dialed things in such that we might get paged once or twice during that week and usually the pages wind up being minor/non-issues. It’s really not bad, in my opinion.