81–90 of 282 posts
My last gig, on call worked well, I thought, for a few reasons: it was our services that we wrote, it was 1 wk out of 6 that you were on call, we heavily prioritized fixing unactionable alerts and automating fixes -- every alert had a runbook entry that described the non-automated fixes, and while on call your or sprint commitments were not counted, That last point was very nice as it meant you could work on whatever…
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Finally, somewhere that I fully agree with. Being on-call while you do not get called upon is 24 / 7 work because you have to live your entire life around being available. Like the blog post mentions, grocery shopping has implications because if you happen to have an on-call event while shopping it means leaving your cart to run to your car to address the situation because you can't leave your house without your work…
You're using "never" everywhere here. That is in my opinion the main red flag here. On-call should be at most one week in four-six. Moreover, with a healthy on-call culture (where stuff is fixed, and alerts happen rarely in practice), usually you can pass/swap on-call to others for an evening, or for an afternoon, or for a weekend, as almost always there is somebody who's plan is "sitting at home" and nobody minds ha…
And holy moly! One whole week of being on-call is way too much.
My company(UK) recently tried to force on-call on all engineers. The initial wording was very restrictive, like 5 minute acknowledgement time and 15 minutes at-laptop. 24/7 for 7 days. They tried to have this implemented without any extra remuneration or perks for the on-call engineer. On top of it possibly being very illegal, it seems very immoral to spring something like that on people that did on agree to it when…
it's like as long as its not me, i dont care how much your suffer.
After being a SWE for a decade in Europe, I have never heard of anyone in my network who needed to be on-call. Is this a US thing or only for devops? Why would a software engineer need to be on call ever? That just means the CICD/testing/validation pipeline sucks.
A major issue with on-call, and certainly one I've encountered multiple times, is the high likelihood of moral hazard - the people who are responsible for addressing incidents are not the same people who designed and maintained the system at fault. This results in the former team feeling powerless to put out fires which could have been prevented by more robust design, and the latter team having no incentive to improv…
> Being On-Call Sucks Which is why I won't do it. Either hire people specifically to do it, or provide sufficient incentives so that people volunteer. Being a good "first responder" is a skill and not everyone has it or wants it.
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How does it work for you to be on-call 24/7 for escalation? I get that that ends up happening for many committed founders/operators/managers, but I struggle how that can be a real strategy. Are you never off-grid for a bit, or drunk in a bar, or just on a real no-work vacation? There seem to be situations where being on call just isn’t feasible.
I was effectively oncall 24/7 at my job at times in 2020. I barely noticed the pandemic. I never strayed far from my computer. Also, yes, I tried not to drink much. I certainly learned what my limits are. People think I am a pretty good engineer (not amazing) but what I am known for is being able to keep that level of performance up for a long time. For my part, despite my reputation, I tried to quit a few times. Not…
On-call is even worse for people with disabilities. I quite literally can't do it unless I stop taking my antipsychotic. Under ADA, I can not be placed on call, regardless of policy, nor can I be discriminated against for that. On-call is not an essential function of being a software developer, with very few exceptions—all of which have nothing to do with "policy" or "fairness". Needless to say, companies (and some c…
I had a co-worker at a previous job, he did two or three on-call rotation and told our boss that he couldn't do it. Mentally it's simply to much for him, especially outside business hours where he felt alone with to much responsibility. In terms of abilities and qualifications he was absolutely able to do the job. Nobody complained or got angry with him over it, because everyone could relate.
At the other end of the scale I had another co-worker, in a more complicated scenario who absolutely didn't care. The payment for the on-call shifts was very good, so he just grabbed as many as possible. He would just take his laptop golfing, no problem. His reasoning: Either he'd know how to fix the problem, if not he'd just to call someone else and hand of the incident.