Company size: 2 programmers only when the other guy is on vacation
You wanna make it 3 programmers?
Ask HN: How often are you on call?
21–30 of 46 posts
Re: Ask HN: How often are you on call?
#22Never, and I don't consider any job that demands this. Learn what work-life separation means.
That's clearly not a sustainable answer for the world - professions ranging from doctors to priests to soldier to sailor to CEO (can't ignore a crisis if it happens on Saturday morning) to lawmaker all require working the occasional unscheduled hour. And that's not even counting jobs like pilot or convenience store clerk or paramedic that require at least some people to work on what the world considers holidays (even if it's scheduled as part of their 40 hours a week).
Is there a meaning of "work-life separation" that encompasses these professions too, or shall we say the world relies on some people not having it?
Re: Ask HN: How often are you on call?
#23Work for FAANG, team size is 6-8~. I'm oncall 24/7 roughly one week out of 6. Usually paged 1-2 times per shift except during 'peak' periods but we usually subdivide the rotation for those.
My worst shift I was paged during off hours twice, but was only woken one of those times.
Re: Ask HN: How often are you on call?
#24My tier 3 team is on 1-week point-Dev rotations. Roughly 1wk in 9 on primary, same again on secondary. They take about 2-3 calls per primary+secondary. I’m on Tier 4 in mgmt roster, and on call every other week. Take escalations and fall thrus every 3-4mths. Tier 4 also plays duty manager during events such as product launches.
Re: Ask HN: How often are you on call?
#25Largeish company (engineering staff around 1000, I think?), and my team owns the OS platform (packaging, config management), hardware purchasing, and the installer, as well as our private cloud, which hosts a good chunk of services (notably including dev machines, notably excluding the most money-making parts of the business). A separate team is first-line sysadmin+SRE for most of the company, so we don't respond unless you can't install machines or if every machine is broken, or if the private cloud (as infrastructure, not a specific VM on it) is acting up.
Private cloud was originally a separate team, and we had about 5 people on a weekly rotation, where you'd do support and 24/7 on-call for a week. Now that we've merged, it's about a dozen people on the on-call rotation, though we still have a subteam of about 5 for the weekly rotation of who's paying attention to private cloud support tickets during working hours.
Thanks to some work that we did a bit after I joined, we got the off-hours paging to be much less frequent - in particular we no longer page if any hypervisor is down, only if either a whole availability zone is down, or a hypervisor hosting personal dev machines is down and it's business hours. (Otherwise, higher-level services ought to have failover between multiple VMs, and devs working odd hours can use backup machines.) Usually that second condition gets noticed by the support person (in Jira) before it escalates to the on-call person. So it's rare to have anyone actually paged, and it usually means something unexpected is on fire. So, any member of the team is as good as any other at figuring out what broke and whether it can wait until morning, which is why we were able to throw all of the combined team into the rotation without training them all in everything.
There are still improvements I want to do, but the expected number of pages rounds to zero (it looks like we've had 6 off-hours pages this year) so it's certainly manageable.
Re: Ask HN: How often are you on call?
#26Technically 24/7, except for clustered stuff that hardly goes down. More than a year since the last time; I think. Thousands of employees, team of 7 or so
Re: Ask HN: How often are you on call?
#27Never, and I don't consider any job that demands this. Learn what work-life separation means.
That's clearly not a sustainable answer for the world - professions ranging from doctors to priests to soldier to sailor to CEO (can't ignore a crisis if it happens on Saturday morning) to lawmaker all require working the occasional unscheduled hour. And that's not even counting jobs like pilot or convenience store clerk or paramedic that require at least some people to work on what the world considers holidays (even…
> or shall we say the world relies on some people not having [...]?
It does rely on that. Supply and demand works that way. Eventually the offered price is enough to change some minds. I'll change mine at about $3k/hour-on-call.
Re: Ask HN: How often are you on call?
#28Quite a lot. 30% of the day on average.
Re: Ask HN: How often are you on call?
#29Never, and I don't consider any job that demands this. Learn what work-life separation means.
That's clearly not a sustainable answer for the world - professions ranging from doctors to priests to soldier to sailor to CEO (can't ignore a crisis if it happens on Saturday morning) to lawmaker all require working the occasional unscheduled hour. And that's not even counting jobs like pilot or convenience store clerk or paramedic that require at least some people to work on what the world considers holidays (even…
If someone is dying, go ahead and page me!
Otherwise, companies need to hire night shifts if they want someone covering while the devs are asleep. If you want full uptime, then hire for it! Your employees shouldn't give up their sleep and weekends for a measly 0.003% of your company.
Also, I would strongly support extra pay for low-wage workers working holidays, weekends, or night shifts.
Re: Ask HN: How often are you on call?
#30Small bootstrappes company working on SaaS. Im the lead and has 2 programmers on the team, so Im the one usually on call, 24/7.