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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

#171

Post by shafyy »

mikeocool wrote: post #146
ggeorgovassilis wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You expect to not be responsible for what happens to the software you put into production? First: IT seems to be rather the exception - most professions have no on-call. Eg. even if my car mechanic screws up a service job, they'll have me bring the car back into the garage during their normal working hours, regardless of how and where stranded I am in the middle of the night. A second comment: I'll be responsible f…

> 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.

I mean.... On call doctors literally save lives. Most on-call software engineers don't. So.

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#172

Post by bdangubic »

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…

you should be looking for another job… immediately… terraforming on YOUR time is no way to live…

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#173

Post by SuperNinKenDo »

nosefurhairdo wrote: post #159
mikedelfino wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the company has enough people in the team, someone just works the night shifts or on scheduled weekends. No one needs to be on-call because there would be someone taking care of it already.

Is the argument here that every software team should have engineers whose normal working hours have 24/7/365 coverage?

If you expect your team to provide 24/7/365 assurance, then it's hard to see how that isn't a perfectly reasonable idea. The only counter to it is that keeping people on call shifts financial cost off the business in the form of psychological cost to its employees. Not very convincing.

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#174

Post by nosefurhairdo »

alemanek wrote: post #164
nosefurhairdo wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is a good point. I am fortunate to have a good manager who recognizes the unfair burden. I have missed a pagerduty notification before, which my manager dealt with. The incident did not appear to affect my subsequent performance review, as evidenced by top of band compensation.

I would expect stricter accountability with a more reasonable on-call schedule.

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#175

Post by lolinder »

BHSPitMonkey wrote: post #162
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.

It depends on who has the largest amount of influence on how noisy the on call is.

If engineers have blanket control to define what is important enough to get interrupted and to prioritize fixing frequent offenders, then sure, it's a perverse incentive.

If, on the other hand, engineering doesn't have very much control over the roadmap and/or isn't allowed to make their own judgment calls about what really matters for pages, then the arrangement that OP describes makes a ton of sense—it gets gets pages onto the budget as a separate line item, which is a good way to get the people who are really in charge on board with investing in permanent fixes.

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#176

Post by chairmansteve »

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…

Only a disfunctional company would rely on the programmer who wrote the code.

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#177

Post by bsder »

mikeocool wrote: post #163
quicklime wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, bu…

> 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.

Only if you're dying.

Come in late Friday and you're going to be sitting in a bed until Monday even if your gall bladder is about to explode.

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#178

Post by seusscat »

lolinder wrote: post #175
BHSPitMonkey wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It depends on who has the largest amount of influence on how noisy the on call is. If engineers have blanket control to define what is important enough to get interrupted and to prioritize fixing frequent offenders, then sure, it's a perverse incentive. If, on the other hand, engineering doesn't have very much control over the roadmap and/or isn't allowed to make their own judgment calls about what really matters for…

It also becomes a good deterrent against useless requests. You get pinged on Slack at 10pm? Just ask them to file a ticket with a page-worthy severity. When its not nearly as important as that, even external managers will hesitate to do that since they need to explain if the ticket was worth 150% base pay for 3 hours plus the extra PTO next day.

Significantly reduces the number of pages.

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#179

Post by seusscat »

BHSPitMonkey wrote: post #162
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.

Ehh.. Only pages between 18:00 and 09:00 count for extra pay. Which means it affects your free / personal time. Where I am, the people care a lot about work not intruding on their personal time, so the perverse incentives are reduced.

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#180

Post by RandomThoughts3 »

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 have never worked for a company where people building the software and people supporting it when it is critical were the same. The idea is weird to me.

Plus any large enough company should have team in spread out timezones eliminating the need for on call if it’s correctly managed.

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