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Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

arthur-johnston.com

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Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#161

Post by stackskipton »

Retric wrote: post #148
stackskipton wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On call shouldn't have 24/7 responsibilities. For example, I'm on call and took a call this morning due to MySQL Server running out of space. Terraform change later, it's no longer out of space and I'm back to my day. I'll take 30 minutes it took me to resolve out of my normal time elsewhere. If on call balloons your 40 hours to 70 hours, yes, you have an issue. That's not normal and you should consider changing jobs…

Waking someone up is going to cost far more than the time spent fixing the issue.

I wasn’t woken up. If someone is woken up, it’s expected they take more time off.

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#162

Post by BHSPitMonkey »

seusscat wrote: post #126

I hate on-call shifts, but if they must exist, I like the way my team handles them. We have split day and night shifts. 7-18 day shift, and 18-07 night shift. All non-work hours compensated with standby at 10% of hourly pay. Any pages outside of work hours earn you an additional 150% in base pay. Each page guarantees a minimum of 3 hours of pay even if you spent only 5 mins on it. And since in my country, you must ga…

I like the idea of added compensation based on hours covered as it incentivizes the business to avoid very small rotation sizes, but paying extra per page seems like a perverse incentive favoring instability.

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#163

Post by mikeocool »

quicklime wrote: post #153
mikeocool wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IT seems to be rather the exception I think there’s actually a fair number of jobs where some level of this is expected. Doctors are one obvious example — they have on call responsibilities often more onerous than IT, and depending on the situation don’t always receive additional compensation for it. If you manage people who work different hours from you, in a lot of jobs it’s not uncommon to be called in if shit h…

> Doctors are one obvious example — they have on call responsibilities often more onerous than IT, and depending on the situation don’t always receive additional compensation for it. My doctor (primary care physician) doesn’t work outside of business hours. In an emergency the recorded message says to call an ambulance and go to the emergency department at the hospital, which is staffed by a different set of people.…

If you go to most hospitals at 2AM and need a specialist of some kind (say a specific type of surgeon), there’s going to be someone in that specialty on call whose going to get paged to wake up, come in, and see you.

Even in family practice, it’s not uncommon to be able to get a call back from the on call doctor at the practice on weekends or off hours — if you’ve got a situation that maybe doesn’t warrant the ER, but you’re not sure if it can wait until Monday.

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#164

Post by alemanek »

nosefurhairdo wrote: post #157
sed_zeppelin wrote: post #104

I just want to jump in as a minority voice here. In case anybody is reading the other comments and feeling... alienated. I refuse to accept on-call duties, full stop. If a job posting expects it, I don't apply. If a hiring manager says they have it, I do not accept the offer. If management starts talking about maybe implementing it, I protest. If it becomes enacted, I resign. There is absolutely no situation in which…

I've been the on call engineer on my team for 75+% of the last year (most of my team is contractors, new hire not onboarded to on call rotation yet, etc.). It's not an issue because we don't break prod. I also feel I'm well compensated. When there have been issues at inconvenient hours, my manager has encouraged me to take it easy after resolving the incident. We've also prioritized improving our integration tests an…

On call even if you aren’t actually called is still a burden. No drinking or other impairing substances. Need to be available and ready to help on weekends. So unable to disconnect and go on a hike or some other activity without internet and your laptop.

75% on call even if I was never called would be profoundly unhealthy for me. So I wouldn’t dismiss the toll of just being available 24/7.

EDIT: I forgot to mention I am on an on call rotation but it is 1week on and 7 weeks off. So, not too horrible.

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#165

Post by gwillz »

I work in a small team, we have ~30 active clients and other ~100 or so that are low maintenance or dormant.

We don't have an on-call rotation but I desperately want one. Because if no one is on-call - then all of us are on-call. Any one of us could be called at any time if one of our larger commerce projects falls over.

To me on-call is a necessary burden that means when I'm not on duty I am completely free to ignore my phone.

I'll certainly feel more positive about helping outside of the 9-5. I do like to be helpful, but perhaps that'll wear off like some kind of honeymoon period, juxtaposed to my current situation.

I'm always looking for more positives in such a system because I want it to work. Tuesday to Tuesday sounds great. Other comments here highlight the difference between critical fixes and patch it laters. Any other insights are welcome.

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#166

Post by chungus »

When I just started out, I used to take everybody's on-call service because it paid well. Also had the advantage that I learned the ropes quicker. Now-a-days I'm very happy to not be awoken at 3am, even if 1 weekend incident would amount to a couple grand.

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#167

Post by badgersnake »

stackskipton wrote: post #142
badgersnake wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Give them the time and budget to build it like a bridge then. Oh wait, your competitors beat you to market by several years. Making people work 24/7 is not conducive to good anything, thus on call is a terrible way to do things.

On call shouldn't have 24/7 responsibilities. For example, I'm on call and took a call this morning due to MySQL Server running out of space. Terraform change later, it's no longer out of space and I'm back to my day. I'll take 30 minutes it took me to resolve out of my normal time elsewhere. If on call balloons your 40 hours to 70 hours, yes, you have an issue. That's not normal and you should consider changing jobs…

If you are expected to carry your laptop and answer the phone you are working. Whether you get paged or not is irrelevant.

The corporate gaslighting is strong with this one.

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#168

Post by uuddlrlrbaba »

deathanatos wrote: post #125
sed_zeppelin wrote: post #104

I just want to jump in as a minority voice here. In case anybody is reading the other comments and feeling... alienated. I refuse to accept on-call duties, full stop. If a job posting expects it, I don't apply. If a hiring manager says they have it, I do not accept the offer. If management starts talking about maybe implementing it, I protest. If it becomes enacted, I resign. There is absolutely no situation in which…

You expect to not be responsible for what happens to the software you put into production? (… and I'd like to avoid distracting arguments that amount to "my company does on-call badly" — yeah, those problems do exist and we should strive to fix them. But if I'm to not categorize the argument here as the baby with the bathwater, then we need something to replace on-call with. Prod goes down on a Saturday afternoon; ar…

I expect to be very responsible during my working hours.

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#169

Post by renewiltord »

I always do Wednesday to Wednesday. I think I’d rather fix something than having it hanging over my head. That said, I prefer systems that don’t require constant attendance. But when I was young, I reveled in that. You get to have a lot of fun firefighting and using each chance to make sure the fire can’t be lit next time. Thoroughly enjoyable and eventually the fires reduce.

I still think of each error as a possibility of improvement to asymptotic zero error and I prefer working with people like that.

Others prefer other systems and I think that it’s fine for each of these groups to select for members appropriately aligned.

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#170

Post by renewiltord »

sed_zeppelin wrote: post #104

I just want to jump in as a minority voice here. In case anybody is reading the other comments and feeling... alienated. I refuse to accept on-call duties, full stop. If a job posting expects it, I don't apply. If a hiring manager says they have it, I do not accept the offer. If management starts talking about maybe implementing it, I protest. If it becomes enacted, I resign. There is absolutely no situation in which…

I think the useful thing here is to mention the trade-off. Practically all my SWE friends making $1m+ are instant responders whether denoted so or not.
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