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Being on Call

tyler.kim

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Re: Being on Call

#101

Post by bobthepanda »

8fingerlouie wrote: post #43
gambiting wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sometimes wonder where the hell most HNers work where 9am is not considered late start. At a warehouse I worked at the shift was 6am to 2pm. And it was great that way as you avoided most of the summer heat. The software company where I work now, 8am is standard, that way you're nicely done at 4pm and have the entire evening to yourself. My wife is also a programmer and usually starts at 7:30am because that's their…

> starts at 7:30am because that's their first scrum We have scrum inside mandatory hours. There's a fairly strict company policy that you cannot schedule _recurring_ meetings outside mandatory hours, and if you do, you cannot expect people to attend, so scrum here is 9am. Even scheduling non recurring meetings outside mandatory hours is frowned upon. As for the schedule itself, it fits nicely with (european) family l…

This isn’t super common where I am (although you can do it). I had a coworker who practiced something like this so they could go to the gym in the afternoon when it would be less crowded. Or for the soccer example, not much of a choice if you want to watch live European sports.

Also at least in Seattle it seems like every doctor’s office keeps bankers hours (M-F 9-5) so you would have to disrupt your own workday to go to an appointment, though in practice I haven’t known people to bother putting in extra work if their projects are reasonably getting done on time.

Re: Being on Call

#102

Post by ricksunny »

taylodl wrote: post #83
antihero wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what hellish sort of company is 9AM "late"?

There are 10 kinds of developers in the world... Those who like to start their day mid morning and those who like to start their day early morning. To accommodate everyone a lot of companies use a standard "core time" of 10-2 where everyone needs to be in the office.

It's sad that different chronotypes aren't taken into account for work schedules. There are many an individual contributor, and manager, who naturally outperform outside of the usual 9-5 framework. Formally it's called Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome (DSPS). Practically these are the people whose ancestors were guarding the tribe keeping it safe at night.

Re: Being on Call

#104

Post by pc86 »

sdevonoes wrote: post #84
pc86 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you've got testing, code reviews, QA, and CI/CD, Friday deployments should be totally fine.

The point is "Friday deployments" are not needed (unless we are talking about hotfixes). What's the use case? Can't it wait until Monday? Why are all in such a rush?

I would say that if things are tested appropriately (it's a big if, and not an easy thing to do honestly), when you commit a new feature it should go through the testing process and right into production. If that makes you nervous then there's more testing that needs to be added. Canary deployments with extensive monitoring and automated rollbacks and make this almost entirely hands-off.

For most software systems the goal should be to abstract away the actual act of "deploying" and let the infrastructure handle that on its own.

Re: Being on Call

#105

Post by andrewem »

smcl wrote: post #7
yuliyp wrote: post #5

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 author is in the military - I've read a fair few things by current and former service members and two of the most common themes are: - the disregard for health and wellbeing of each soldier - being required to do nonsensical things that are counterproductive and likely compromise medium-to-long term goals of the outfit you're attached to So I agree with what you said - there is very likely a way to schedule these…

The United States Navy had serious problems with work demands causing sleep deprivation. Here’s a news story about a policy update they made:

“The “Comprehensive Crew Endurance Management Policy,” signed off Dec. 11 by Naval Surface Force Pacific and Naval Surface Force Atlantic, is the first update to the joint instruction issued just months after two 2017 fatal at-sea collisions rocked the Navy.”

Basically the crews were too tired to think clearly and crashed into things, causing damage and deaths on their ships.

https://news.usni.org/2021/01/28/latest-surface-navy-sleep-p...

Re: Being on Call

#106

Post by Nannooskeeska »

dd_roger wrote: post #85
antihero wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what hellish sort of company is 9AM "late"?

There's no company policy mandating me to start that early yet I start between 7am and 7:30am, by 8am the office is mostly full. The earlier you start the more daylight left to enjoy at the end of the day. 9am really sounds awfully late. People who start at 9 don't enjoy their morning any more than I do. They just wake up later. And it forces them to stay longer in the evening while I'm out taking advantage of the ex…

I'm with you 100%. I'm usually the first one in the office (well, pre-COVID anyway) and the first one to leave. Anecdotally, it's same since we started working from home - I usually try to start around 7-7:30am, and I generally don't start getting replies from coworkers until 8:30am or later.

I see a lot of threads and comments about starting at 9-10am, and I don't understand it. I'm usually eating lunch at 11am and done with work by 3:30pm. It's so nice! The few times I've had to work until 5-6pm have been awful for me. I feel like I don't really have any time to really DO anything before bed.

Re: Being on Call

#107

Post by closeparen »

watwut wrote: post #16
bayindirh wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not military, but worked with them for two years, sometimes with similar schedules. My view about being a soldier, a serviceman has changed drastically during that projects. The cause is noble, and the thing they're doing is very hard . Make no mistake here. On the other hand, they're stripped of their emotions and humanity to an extent. They become something else, an hardened being after some time. Because, they…

Imo, whether being soldier is noble depends very very much on which army you are in and what are current goals and conduct of said army.

A society gets no points for having noble goals if it lacks the capacity to attain them.

Re: Being on Call

#108

Post by luftbbb »

ricksunny wrote: post #102
taylodl wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are 10 kinds of developers in the world... Those who like to start their day mid morning and those who like to start their day early morning. To accommodate everyone a lot of companies use a standard "core time" of 10-2 where everyone needs to be in the office.

It's sad that different chronotypes aren't taken into account for work schedules. There are many an individual contributor, and manager, who naturally outperform outside of the usual 9-5 framework. Formally it's called Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome (DSPS). Practically these are the people whose ancestors were guarding the tribe keeping it safe at night.

That's a really interesting take regarding the ancestral thing. It makes me wonder... In part, we are basically a genetic sum of our ancestors

Re: Being on Call

#109

Post by ornornor »

dijit wrote: post #29

This seems counter-productive. Humans with sleep deprivation are prone to mistakes (as the author admits). I know "we do what our bosses tell us"- but honestly if it was me I would be informing my boss that this is counter-productive and will cost the company (or in this case the country and it's countrymen). Much better to have staggered shifts or even a small night crew.

> if it was me I would be informing my boss that this is counter-productive

I suspect you’re fairly new to the workforce. Try that for a few years, see how little effect it has but how much energy it sucks away from you, and then resign to simply doing “what the bosses want” even if it means setting piles of cash on fire on a regular basis.

Re: Being on Call

#110

Post by viraptor »

sdevonoes wrote: post #91
viraptor wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So once both senior and non-senior engineers opt out of on-call, who do you expect to take care of issues that happen out of hours? (In case of companies who deal with 24h traffic and transactions)

Dedicated people hired as such.

That's realistically out of reach for non-enterprise companies. If they're not primarily standard senior engineers doing typical day work, you need at least 4 people to cover the on-call week + redundancies for leave. You're talking about employing a whole extra team just to handle an occasional callout.
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