throw a dice and swap some shifts when possible
Ask HN: How does your team decide who works oncall on Christmas?
11–15 of 15 posts
Re: Ask HN: How does your team decide who works oncall on Christmas?
#12Whatever the scheme, being on call is better than having to work 12 hr shifts every other holiday like my wife does (ICU nurse).
Re: Ask HN: How does your team decide who works oncall on Christmas?
#13As a manager, I try and take most of it on when possible. The team have worked hard all year and I view it as good leadership to let them have that space.
Re: Ask HN: How does your team decide who works oncall on Christmas?
#14When I had a team, we'd trade based on faith -- Jewish or Muslim folks worked Christmas, and on their holidays us "cultural Catholics"[1] covered so they could have "their" day off. Even among those who were no longer religious, folks often had families who still hold these beliefs. (I was educated in a Catholic school, was an altar boy, and will never return to either place, so I use the term "cultural Catholicism"…
Didn't you still run into times when most people wanted the time off? For example, times when schools are off, so everybody who is a parent wants that time off, regardless of whether it lines up with their cultural or religious important dates?
Not everyone has kids. Even if everyone has kids, most of the time employees will be in different school districts and have different holiday calendars.
Re: Ask HN: How does your team decide who works oncall on Christmas?
#15Maybe the better question is why is this a problem? I've been in oncall rotations my entire multi decade career and in the beginning I was frustrated that I was getting called all the time. Now I understand that the reason for that was bad management/owners. I'm still oncall but if there's a issue that triggers a review to make changes so it never happens again. N+1 on everything, and N+2 redundancy on critical syste…
I think what you describe is the ambition of every oncall team. But even when this works really well, so the calls are few and far between, just being scheduled to work oncall means you're more limited in what you can do. You've got to be reachable by phone. You have to be within a few minutes of accessing a computer with good networking. There'll be no road trip drives or flights to see the in-laws while you're the…
My point is that often times we are active participants in bad infrastructure and bad oncall programs. If you're not calling for post outage remediation plans and actively implementing them, then you're enabling bad process. If management is not budgeting for and prioritizing this work and not paying over time for time worked when on call, and you haven't found another job, you're enabling. Good employees don't enable bad practices, good employees don't work at companies that allow for bad practices. Even in a bad job market there is always room for good employees to shift to better employers. Good employers welcome these kind of changes because they attach a financial cost to on call and then they look to reduce that as a cost center. Bad employers do not track or attach a budget line item to on call outages therefore they continue to abuse the employees that allow themselves to be put in that situation.
Once you've worked on call for a good employer, you'll absolutely understand what I'm saying. The idea of being alone person shackled to a pager biting your nails because it's a holiday becomes a thing of the past.