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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

#21
post #7

I’ve always been partial for Friday night through Friday night. You start off over the weekend, when you have energy and can survive the two days alone. Ideally no Friday releases so the transition is calm, but as the writer says the batches might fail. You spend the week fixing whatever breaks. You’re cleanly off the Monday to Monday sprint, just doing on-call/ops. You finish Friday evening and immediately get Frida…

Maybe I'm taking you too literally, but I wouldn't want to have a handoff sync-up (or any meeting, really) on a Friday night, nor push that earlier so significant things can happen between sync-up and the actual shift in responsibility from person to person. Friday-to-Friday does sound good.

One thing I really liked in a previous job was a split daytime-vs-nighttime rotation. It was well worth a little annoyance to set up in our tools. One week you'd be the 'daytime' oncall for business hours (something like 9-5 Mon-Fri, though we might have tweaked those hours a bit; it might have been 10-6 or something). The next you'd be on call for the complementary time (5-9, weekends). You were on call for the same total amount of time, just smeared over two different weeks. It ended up being less of a burden to optimize your schedule for a reasonable response time, but operational work still got done. And in practice awareness of operational issues was not too hard to maintain between the two members of the split.

(I think the best thing, if you can swing it, is probably a follow-the-sun rotation where there are three teams distributed 8 hours apart around the globe, and they trade off 8-hour workday shifts. But a lot of uncommon things probably have to be true of your organization for that idea to even be on the radar.)

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#22
post #10

Is anyone getting compensated for being on-call? If you are paged and work outside of business hours, do you receive additional compensation?

On my teams, if someone got paged off-hours they would just work less the day after the event. imo it should just be part of the regular salary/work expectations, incentivizing keeping oncall low

Where I work, this would have no impact on the amount of tasks shoved into the pipeline by product and leadership.

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#23
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On my teams, if someone got paged off-hours they would just work less the day after the event. imo it should just be part of the regular salary/work expectations, incentivizing keeping oncall low

No, it should be compensated, so Management prioritises fixing issues, instead of adding new bugs

I've wished for a tech workers union for this reason. I don't care about pay, let the union say nothing about pay.

But let's align incentives. Any time spent fixing issues on-call is compensated 4-to-1. Workers may accrue compensation time, and any compensation time in excess of 20 hours is paid 10-to-1 when the employee leaves. The idea here isn't for workers to accrue and cash out comp time, but instead to give an incentive to the organization to ensure workers use their comp time.

Let's align incentives, what's hard on the worker should be hard on the owners and management.

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#25
post #10

Is anyone getting compensated for being on-call? If you are paged and work outside of business hours, do you receive additional compensation?

Yes, 350€ (before taxes of course) per week. No additional compensation for responding/ working on incidents.

I would be interested in how response times are?

Mine is 15mins. So I have to respond and be in a incident call within 15mins.

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#26
We do Thursday to Thursday and then you get Friday off after completed on-call. Being on-call gives you no extra pay by itself, but if you get paged off hours and need to work you get paid 150 to 200% of your normal hourly wage depending on what time of day you need to work.

Best on-call I’ve had.

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#29

> Most places take after hours paging pretty seriously. LOL i wish

My team has a meeting to hand off the on-call to the next person, and we discuss all pages we got during the week. Primarily two things: whether the page was for a good reason or not (good: our on-call person had an something actionable to fix. bad: non-actionable pages, pages because someone else's system was broken, false alarms, etc), and also whether there is something we can do so we never get paged for this again. I find it very effective at reducing pages.

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#30
On a past team I set up on-call to be:

- Mon/Tue - Wed/Thu - Fri - Sat/Sun

Original reason for this schedule was that on-call was paid by days per quarter in a tiered system so this guaranteed that all members got the 5% on-call for 10 days/quarter rather than one person hitting 9 days and dropping to 3%, but I stand by this as a better on-call rotation.

The number of people does need to be not wholly divisible so the days rotate so if you run into this you can combine Fri into Sat/Sun or break Sat/Sun apart. It’s a bit complex to set up but the mental impact of on-call is greatly reduced and if you need a week for vacation you can much more easily find someone to cover your shift for a couple days in a nearby week rather than ending up with 2 weeks back to back 6 weeks from now. And if you pull a weekend you get the week off rather than losing your weekend to on-call and going into a work week still on-call.

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