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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

#201

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

majormajor wrote: post #137
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am 40 yrs old. I get paid a shit-ton of money (just around $200K) to do this stupid tech work job. I work 40 hours a week, I get benefits, flex time, plus I work remote. If I'm getting paged for a legitimate issue that is related to something I built or maintain, then, yes, I am going to respond on-call. Because it's a fucking privilege to get paid this much money to sit on my ass and type into a screen. If I'm get…

An on-call rotation without sufficient influence over the roadmap and planning to be able to fix persistent problems so they don't repeatedly cause the same issues over and over and over is toxic. And it's gonna kill the team's overall productivity so it's not good for management either. Congrats, you're playing SWE salaries for an ops team that would traditionally cost you less otherwise. In a more healthy situation…

Well, I have two thoughts about that:

1) gigs without 24/7 operations are rare, because there is no good reason for a tech product not to be 24/7. it's not costing extra electricity to keep the lights on overnight, nor more staff. there are a bunch of these gigs (my last gig had no customers for 2+ years) but you shouldn't expect them, because part of the reason we're paid so much money is we're expected to deliver "continuous value". most devs would agree with this, because they all want to be able to deploy continuously, whenever they want. (which is a terrible idea, but it is the status quo.) furthermore, if you're doing your job right (and so is Ops), supporting a 24/7 product should not result in on-call pages, because nothing should be breaking outside regular business hours. if it is breaking outside regular hours, somebody sucks at their job. and Ops' job is pretty simple, so...

2) you do have lots of control over the roadmap, planning, etc. but nobody is going to walk up to you and say "hey we were just thinking of maybe doing this in the roadmap, is that okay with you?" you have to get involved, early, and consistently. you have to show you're not going to rock the boat, but that you will have good suggestions, and can show they will turn into better outcomes. you have to play a little politics, a little product ownership, and also an engineering role, in order to influence what the business decides to do. as you get more senior this gets easier because people will defer to you more, but even an extremely likeable junior can influence the roadmap.

on the off-chance that you're just trapped in engineering hell, with hostile management, a terrible product, and a completely apathetic and terrified staff, quit immediately. this isn't normal and you shouldn't think "oh, I'm trapped here." people don't stay in abusive relationships because there's no other choice, they stay because they've justified their own abuse.

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#202

Post by happymellon »

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…

This is wrong on so many levels.

No they don't.

I know plenty of people who have had to sit around for 8+ hours because the particular type of doctor is not available. The on call only really applies if you're bleeding out.

In my 20+ years of development and support, there has only been once that I was paged due to an actual catastrophic failure. Most are because shitty "SREs" wants monitoring on everything, even if its stuff that I have no control over.

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#203

Post by darthrupert »

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 had on-call jobs at one point in my career. It roughly doubled my salary, and I put most of that into assets that rose about 20,000% in 10 years. So that was nice.

The job can be excruciatibg though. Don't do it without proper compensation.

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#204

Post by _w1tm »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #200
SuperNinKenDo wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Would you take the night shift? Everyone I've seen promote this idea seems to expect that they'll be the lucky ones who get to keep a normal schedule. If you have a service that needs 24/7 uptime, and you transition from an oncall model to a shift model, at least 2 out of every 3 engineers on the team are going to have to change shifts or quit. If the entire industry shifts, high-availability software would simply jo…

The sane way to solve that problem is to hire people in different time zones to get coverage. Some still need to do weekends but even those are not the same in every country (e.g. Israel).

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#205

Post by darkwater »

nosefurhairdo wrote: post #174
alemanek wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Congrats, you have a very good work ethic but a very poor personal health ethic.

I was like you, and probably still am deep below, and I will fall again in the same trap. But please, try to think about flipping your point of view here and instead of being your manager generous and your company good for not taking into account the time you failed to answer on duty, think about how you are being exploited covering 75% of on duty alone, and the money the company didn't loose just because of you. And how much of that money you got.

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#206

Post by lightning19 »

thuanao wrote: 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?

Based on the replies to this I didn't realize how bad we have it in South Africa. I was on call 24x7 for 2 years and was not paid anything for it.

Big ecommerce companies and even global brands like AWS and BMW require 24x7 on call without any compensation.

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#207

Post by metaltyphoon »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #193
metaltyphoon wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please enlighten me as to how on call is not free work when companies do not pay for this outside of your regular salary .

1) Salary can include tasks like this. 2) You said they want to. They dont. If you offer same pay for a job with and without it, exactly nobody would choose the job with extra on call duties. The obvious part you are missing is that people do it because they are paid to do it, and they like money.

> Salary can include tasks like this

So lets say that it just magically happens that when YOU are on call, stuff breaks all the time but when its your coworkers it doesn’t. You are all paid the same, does it seem fair to you now?

Unless it’s written in paper where a salaried worker will be getting X extra per hour you are just working for free. The definition of a salaried worker in the US is having 40hrs of total work time averaged throughout a year.

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#208

Post by dillydogg »

I'm not IT, but the hospital I work for has the resident physicans on call Tuesday to Tuesday and the attending physicians Monday to Monday. I have found it to be a good system, with the weekends being covered by people who have a good idea of their patients.

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#209

Post by glitchcrab »

groestl wrote: post #46
glitchcrab wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could not agree more, any company I've worked at with an on-call rotation has always ensured that staff are not scheduled when they have holiday booked. The only time an employee needed to find their own cover is if something unexpected came up during their on-call period and they needed a few hours out (like an emergency visit to the doctor with a child etc). At my current job we have an automated scheduler which us…

> The only time an employee needed to find their own cover is if something unexpected came up during their on-call period and they needed a few hours out (like an emergency visit to the doctor with a child etc). That's exactly the time where "finding your own cover" is the most stressful.

I do see your point, but I think some context about where I work helps here. It's a very chilled company and all teams are very self-organising. In the case of me needing to find cover, I would just drop a message in our on-call slack channel and someone will almost always pick it up (and do the necessary stuff like adding an override in the opsgenie rotation). If nobody happens to see it (unlikely) then I would just let the alerts escalate to the next person who would be happy to pick it up because they know that people don't let alerts escalate without a good reason. Everyone cares about their colleagues so they want to help if they can (it's also quite a small company).

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#210

Post by glitchcrab »

jeduardo wrote: post #45
glitchcrab wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could not agree more, any company I've worked at with an on-call rotation has always ensured that staff are not scheduled when they have holiday booked. The only time an employee needed to find their own cover is if something unexpected came up during their on-call period and they needed a few hours out (like an emergency visit to the doctor with a child etc). At my current job we have an automated scheduler which us…

Are you using an in-house scheduler or is this a feature of a particular tool?

No this is an in-house tool. I would share the repo but for some reason it's private (not sure why, there's nothing confidential in it)
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