31–40 of 140 posts
“Five more on-call shifts will age me by two years.” “By dawn, I can feel my internal organs are rotting.” “Just gotta rinse and repeat till I’m out.” Is the point of this entire post to invoke an existential crisis in readers? Why would you glorify hurting yourself like this?
What is the point of this article? As far as oncall go, this is an anti-pattern. You should have metrics, alarms and tickets, and oncall should get alerted out of working hours only of high impact issues that require human intervention. If it is about the requirement to pull all nighters or crazy schedules, some jobs do it in a regular basis (I would know, my sister is a nurse in a hospital).
“Five more on-call shifts will age me by two years.” “By dawn, I can feel my internal organs are rotting.” “Just gotta rinse and repeat till I’m out.” Is the point of this entire post to invoke an existential crisis in readers? Why would you glorify hurting yourself like this?
What is the point of such a crazy schedule? If someone has to do a double-graveyard shift and is basically useless the rest of the week, why not just split that shift into two so you don't destroy all of the people who try to cover such shifts. People can generally work 4-12 without much trouble or needing to recover after it other than weekends. Doing 12-8 might be an every other night kind of thing. Having a couple…
The isn't a strategic or tactical purpose that makes this kind of situation an intentional or desired outcome. Any sufficiently large organization, and this especially holds true by militaries, are typified by the following two characteristics. First, turnover at scale necessarily prevents the rank-and-file, in aggregate, from learning and developing over time. Every year, X number of people will leave the organization for reasons the organization can't control (retirement, spouses moving, legal mandates, whatever) and they will be replaced by people who are completely unfamiliar with the organization and any lessons the people leaving may have learned. Not replacing the people leaving will leave positions unfilled, which is untenable, so they will be filled by whoever is around to fill the chair. This is inevitable and unavoidable. Second, there are only so many issues that upper management can focus on. By the time people rise up through the ranks and get into a position where they have the power to do anything, the vast majority of what it means to exercise that power is to act like a hospital at a mass casualty event - triage for the most critical issues that need your attention and trust that a solid reliance on process will prevent anything else from collapsing.
If you're looking for logic then you don't understand how these organizations work.
You're not required to take the call, but you get a fairly large sum of money if you do, meaning people usually take the call despite not being required to.
Because of laws here, you're required to have 11 hours of uninterrupted "free time" after leaving work (no laws on how long a work day is), so taking a call usually means you violate that, which in turn restarts the clock on your "free time", meaning you're entitled to "sleep in" on company time the next day. Doing so of course wreaks havoc on all planning, so very few people actually take the full 11 hours off, and instead just get in "late" around 9am.
Edit: I should probably have explained that the calls happen on average once per system every 2-4 weeks, and the amount of people on call is probably limited to <5%-10% of the engineers.
We have our "ops" guys that monitors the environments, and a list of people for each system that is more or less always on call. Each service/job that is being monitored has a procedure/description for how to respond to failures, and if nothing else works, the people on the list gets a call. You're not required to take the call, but you get a fairly large sum of money if you do, meaning people usually take the call d…
We have our "ops" guys that monitors the environments, and a list of people for each system that is more or less always on call. Each service/job that is being monitored has a procedure/description for how to respond to failures, and if nothing else works, the people on the list gets a call. You're not required to take the call, but you get a fairly large sum of money if you do, meaning people usually take the call d…
In what hellish sort of company is 9AM "late"?
We have our "ops" guys that monitors the environments, and a list of people for each system that is more or less always on call. Each service/job that is being monitored has a procedure/description for how to respond to failures, and if nothing else works, the people on the list gets a call. You're not required to take the call, but you get a fairly large sum of money if you do, meaning people usually take the call d…
In what hellish sort of company is 9AM "late"?
Most people get in between 7am and 8am, and leave between 3pm and 4pm.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In what hellish sort of company is 9AM "late"?
Mandatory hours for most employees is "9am to 3pm". Opening hours for our customers is 10am to 4pm. Everybody is employed at 36 hours /week. Most people get in between 7am and 8am, and leave between 3pm and 4pm.
We have our "ops" guys that monitors the environments, and a list of people for each system that is more or less always on call. Each service/job that is being monitored has a procedure/description for how to respond to failures, and if nothing else works, the people on the list gets a call. You're not required to take the call, but you get a fairly large sum of money if you do, meaning people usually take the call d…
In what hellish sort of company is 9AM "late"?