Thank you indeed! While I have fond memories of working holiday pager support early in my career, especially before marriage and kids to cover for those with families, I’m very grateful for those able to cover for all of us now! Cheers to you all
Tell HN: I salute everyone on call/working support through the holidays
101–110 of 207 posts
Re: Tell HN: I salute everyone on call/working support through the holidays
#102On call sucks so badly. At this point of my life, I firmly believe that there's not enough amount of money that can compensate the mental suffering it implies. Even more if the company you work for has this mentality of "deal with it" without making improvements, which was my case in the last period I did on call and what made the camel's back to break for me. Nowadays I simply refuse it. For those who are still on t…
To me, the worst part of being on call is the stress _after_ my shift ends. I understand that it's a necessary part of the job to fix issues that occur during my shift, so I don't really mind it, but it gives me long term issues. I feel anxious whenever I don't have my phone on me, or when I'm far enough into the wilderness to lose my cell signal. Late night when I don't expect to be getting messages from anyone, a random notification can sometimes give me an immediate stomach-drop panic response.
Unfortunately I feel like I lucked into this role and if I left I wouldn't be able to find anything anywhere near as good.
Re: Tell HN: I salute everyone on call/working support through the holidays
#103Yeah, we discourage production changes starting first or second december week, and start freezing changes third december week until it's frozen solid fourth december week until second week of january. December tends to be hell for our customers, so stability should be a priority there. And honestly, no one wants to work on holidays. So lets just wrap everything starting in december, maybe use the third week for some…
Holiday oncalls are a fun tradeoff. On one hand, no one should be making any changes (and if they do, they'll have some explaining to do), so it's more likely to be calm. On the other, traffic patterns are weird, and it's time off where you'd rather not be tethered to your phone. What's universally bad is being oncall when the code freeze ends or the week leading up to the freeze.
Re: Tell HN: I salute everyone on call/working support through the holidays
#104Is it a US thing to push updates right before holidays and force people to be on call? European companies I've been working on are planing releases till the end of November, first week of December max. All project plans are baked like there is one week in December. While US company tried to force every contractors to work everyday and some weekends too. Are you Indian? You don't celebrate Christmas, you'll be on call…
We discourage changes starting early/mid november and completely freeze deploys a week before thanksgiving and christmas, but there's still so much that can go wrong. The other commenter summarized it well, but in addition there's also systems that require continuous automatic updates as part of their functionality, and sometimes those automatic updates can start to go haywire. For some systems, the holidays are the most important part of the year, and it's extra crucial for people to be monitoring and ready to respond at a moment's notice.
Re: Tell HN: I salute everyone on call/working support through the holidays
#105Thanks. Honestly, all I do is check emails once or twice a day and maybe respond to a DM if there's an emergency, but it's nice to be appreciated.
Re: Tell HN: I salute everyone on call/working support through the holidays
#106On call sucks so badly. At this point of my life, I firmly believe that there's not enough amount of money that can compensate the mental suffering it implies. Even more if the company you work for has this mentality of "deal with it" without making improvements, which was my case in the last period I did on call and what made the camel's back to break for me. Nowadays I simply refuse it. For those who are still on t…
And I am not even sure whether you are talking about just day-time on-call or the 24 hours on-call for at least 1 full week to two week stretches or a simple 12 hours on-call you are talking about? In India the Indian managers (and American managers are just fine with it) have made an environment of this barbaric practice of 24x7 on-call handled by just one person.
In fact, even when there are US/western counterparts these subhumans projects that they will make sure Indian engineers are on-call even during American daytime. This has been happening at my workplace. They employ all tactics - from fear, intimidation, to try to sweat talk engineers into it with shit like, "Oh, we own it, right? So it's our responsibly to support even when it's night".
With that environment it becomes extremely difficult and a pressurised situation for someone like me who simply refuse to even sign up on something like PagerDuty and make it clear that my phone remains silenced and out of my bedroom between 10pm-7am and it really does.
I agree with you - there is no amount of money that can put on on-call, definitely not on a night shift on-call.
Re: Tell HN: I salute everyone on call/working support through the holidays
#107Firefighting sucks. I salute all of the ways people ensure that on-call runbooks are thoroughly documented, not shipping code on Fridays, and robust, simplicity-based engineering that reduces problems during and especially afterhours.
Re: Tell HN: I salute everyone on call/working support through the holidays
#108Always be kind, and say it’s your fault. If you don’t do it for the sake of the person you are asking for help, do it because it works better. That’s the most practical advice [0] ever given by Hans Rosling [1], the Fact master himself: > In fact, I have the secret to how to get the best help immediately from any customer service, like the phone company or the bank or anything. I have the best line, it always works.…
Blame doesn't really help solve or prevent problems. Root cause, blameless analysis with awareness and new tests and mitigation does. Also, career-wise, you won't become an IC9 by admitting to making a lot of mistakes. It's best to just solve them as fast as possible.
Re: Tell HN: I salute everyone on call/working support through the holidays
#109Is it a US thing to push updates right before holidays and force people to be on call? European companies I've been working on are planing releases till the end of November, first week of December max. All project plans are baked like there is one week in December. While US company tried to force every contractors to work everyday and some weekends too. Are you Indian? You don't celebrate Christmas, you'll be on call…
We discourage changes starting early/mid november and completely freeze deploys a week before thanksgiving and christmas, but there's still so much that can go wrong. The other commenter summarized it well, but in addition there's also systems that require continuous automatic updates as part of their functionality, and sometimes those automatic updates can start to go haywire. For some systems, the holidays are the…
There are also systems that aren’t entirely stable due to resource leaks, and when you stop deploying you might find you need to restart them occasionally.
Re: Tell HN: I salute everyone on call/working support through the holidays
#110Managers, if you're reading this, and you have engineers/developers "on call" but not contractually (off book), make it so, because it slightly sucks when you're having Christmas drinks but can't enjoy yourself because you might need to drive somewhere and climb up a ladder to tend to a product.
If somebody asked me to be on call, during a holiday, without overtime, there's no way I'm driving anywhere. If it's worth it to the business, pay me for the time I'm no longer getting to enjoy with my family, or shove it.
Yes, would be nice to not need to mentally prepare to make that call.