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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

#221

Post by bsder »

doubleg72 wrote: post #198
bsder wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sarcasm simply serves to undermine any valid points that you have. The point was that "on call" is specifically confined as an expectation only to certain types of doctors or under very urgent circumstances. In addition, doctors have extra special dysfunctions like "too many hours in a shift". However, many of these are because doctors also have been fighting various efforts to teach more of them which would enable d…

Funny, my wife is primary care yet does on call via answering service. You clearly don’t know what you’re talking about.

Funny, I chose that gall bladder example precisely because I had it happen to me.

In addition, I had something similar happen where I wound up needing Interventional Radiology to insert a drain--again wound up waiting from Friday to Monday morning.

I'm sure some of those doctors were "on call". However, nobody was calling them in unless I started dying.

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#222

Post by joshuamorton »

ksmith14 wrote: post #217
tharkun__ wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are on-call for a 12 hour shift that is more or less aligned with your waking hours I suppose if you're Google they can theoretically make it so it's more aligned with your waking hours? Do they do it? Most companies don't or can't. I.e. it's _less_ aligned. you are compensated extra for the time you are on-call outside of normal working hours, whether or not you are called in How much? Way too many on-call proce…

Google staffs SRE teams as either 8 in one location/TZ or two geographically distributed teams of 6 -- often some pairwise combination of U.S., Europe, and Australia to accommodate reasonable on-call shifts. The on-call compensation varies depending on what tier of service they're offering. Tier 1 (5 minute response time) is 2/3 of your effectively hourly pay for on-call time outside of local business hours and 1/3 f…

Note that this is at a minimum, I know some teams with 10-12 folks per location. That just also has downsides since you can end up oncall once a quarter which most people in the role don't like since the extra vacation is nice.

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#223

Post by 11mariom »

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…

I used to be 50% on-call and it was exhausting. I was just glued to my backpack with laptop in it. It just was BAD.

Even that I had very good manager and if something broke at night I could just disable all the morning alarms and get to office when I wake up… but still. Having all the time in head that you're responsible… nope.

When I stopped being on on-calls it was like HUGE breath to take, and clean the head. I feel a lot better now.

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#224

Post by 11mariom »

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…

100% agree.

But many companies does not understand when I tell them "nice offer, but you should consider someone cheaper for on-call duties, and I can do the rest".

When I was younger I was (kinda) happy to take on-calls, as it was a significant boost in my income. With more experience and better base salary… I simply does not need it and… well - I want to LIVE my life, not WORK (yes, being on call is work, not resting time).

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#225

Post by 71bw »

Oncall for barely any calls. If I have to do anything I just add that as overtime, simple as. Was a bit odd to have to carry my work phone everywhere for the first two weeks or so but now it's just standard procedure

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#226

Post by jeduardo »

glitchcrab wrote: post #210
jeduardo wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Got it, thanks. Well, if you ever decide to open it up I'd be keen to having a look at it. I have yet to see a good automated scheduler and none of the places I've been so far had an automated solution that worked fine when it comes to holidays, scheduled time off, etc. A lot of manual work was put into scheduling shifts, which I always found very disappointing.

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#227

Post by vineyardmike »

erik_seaberg wrote: post #219
coffeefirst wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct. Things are breaking all the time. If you’re not a hospital or air traffic control, nobody is going to die if your website goes down. There’s a time and a place for heroics, but we go to it for shit that doesn’t really matter, or worse, allow the culture of heroics to cover up the real problems that are much harder to fix.

Imagine Walmart telling all their customers "Come back tomorrow, maybe, we can't manage to keep any of our stores open. At least nobody is going to die."

Is this sarcasm?

Most stores close every night.

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#228

Post by rr808 »

szszrk wrote: post #182
rr808 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When did on-call become so accepted and demanded from employers? As a 50 something year old software engineer. Its always been like this. I'm kinda shocked at how reluctant the new generation is to support the systems. Sure we'd all prefer strict 9-5 hours but most companies rely on software to stay in business and you need experts available in case things go wrong.

If you need experts 24/7, you should have had shifts that cover that timeframe. Oncall is a source of so many ways for abuse, don't even ask me how I know. Saying that rejecting Oncall is denying support for you system is bollocks. I'm happy that younger engineers mostly laught at that concept and leave. Once of the few lessons they are teaching us (the old pricks), especially in self care and respect space.

Maybe you're right, systems these days are more 24/7 than they used to be seems like devs these days have had it so easy for so long though.

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#229

Post by szszrk »

rr808 wrote: post #228
szszrk wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you need experts 24/7, you should have had shifts that cover that timeframe. Oncall is a source of so many ways for abuse, don't even ask me how I know. Saying that rejecting Oncall is denying support for you system is bollocks. I'm happy that younger engineers mostly laught at that concept and leave. Once of the few lessons they are teaching us (the old pricks), especially in self care and respect space.

Maybe you're right, systems these days are more 24/7 than they used to be seems like devs these days have had it so easy for so long though.

My observation so far is that businesses don't aim at 24/7 any more. Officially maybe, but not in practice - they accept the risks. Some downtime is less of the deal, if that means less staff and other costs.

It's a big shift in thinking, IMO caused mostly by people not opposing abuse more.

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#230

Post by attendant3446 »

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…

I'm the one who wants to do the night shifts. I miss the time when I worked with a 13-hour time difference due to time zones. But now I don't have the option of working at night, everyone has to be at work during 'business hours', and yet the company I now work for has an on-call policy, and they only pay a tiny bonus to people who join the initiative.
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