Large university, team of 8. All out-of-hours work is on a “best effort” basis only, i.e. I’ll do what I can (which may be nothing) if emailed.
Ask HN: How often are you on call?
31–40 of 46 posts
Re: Ask HN: How often are you on call?
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I’ll do it for $100/h on call. Sweet gig if you do 40h a month on call that’s a sweet $4000 a month and hopefully most times you won’t even be called.
Re: Ask HN: How often are you on call?
#33I run a bootstrapped SAAS business with total team size of 12. I am technically always on call if shit hits the fan. Not in the traditional sense though. If server goes down (has happened like 2 times in past 5 years), I get a call no matter what time of the night it is.
Re: Ask HN: How often are you on call?
#34SRE at Google. We are oncall for 12h then the other site takes over for the other 12h, so no night shifts. You do that for 7 days in a row once every 5 week-ish. Some team have slight variations on that.
We get paged around once per 12h on average but our service is fairly young. More mature services tend to page less I think.
Re: Ask HN: How often are you on call?
#35I work at a 100-person startup. We currently do 1 week secondary followed by 1 week primary. This comes up every 2.5 months. On-call is 8am-8pm with any overnight pages going to execs.
I'll not that we originally had people doing daily shifts and it was a huge pain for those who were religiously observant. It was much harder to get someone to cover a Saturday or Sunday shift since nobody wants to cover those. Will send much better
Re: Ask HN: How often are you on call?
#36Never, 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…
Working N hours in unusual schedule is different from working N hours in usual schedule and then being on call.
With the former, you get some compensation, for example you may work on Saturday but have a free Monday. Depending on your priorities, it may actually be a good deal -- there are things you can do more conveniently when you have a free Monday.
With the latter, it's "when you're at work, you're at work, and when you're at home, there is still a tiny voice in your head remininding you that your boss could call you at literally any moment". This may limit the ways you spend your free time, for example you can't go to places where it would be impossible or very inconvenient to get quickly online when called. And generally, you just can't make promises even about how you spend your free time.
For a sufficiently large company, it should be possible to find a few people willing to take an unusual schedule, and then the company could be covered 24/7, with every employee able to turn off their work phone the moment they leave. It's just... more convenient for the managers to do it the other way round.
Re: Ask HN: How often are you on call?
#37Never, and I don't consider any job that demands this. Learn what work-life separation means.
Seems unreasonable to say never. Like what a sibling commenter said, it seems like you’ll miss out on potential earnings in your career by being this inflexible.
Re: Ask HN: How often are you on call?
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It's pretty naive to think you can just hire random people to step in and support complex business systems part-time.
Sure, you can have a global ops team that can deal with basic system issues like "this machine ran out of disk space", but not "we're seeing a spike in 500s in our payment system because something that got deployed earlier today broke a workflow". And saying "well just roll back!" isn't a solution either. Maybe you can't roll back. Maybe that won't fix it because data is now corrupt. Maybe it wasn't even a deploy to that system that broke things, but some feature flag in some distant system. No one except the team itself can diagnose these issues appropriately.
Re: Ask HN: How often are you on call?
#39Never. I refuse to do on-call without extra incentives. or implement a system that has an increasing payout until someone takes the shift.
Anyone who does on-call without extra pay is a sucker - no disrespect.
Re: Ask HN: How often are you on call?
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This. Or have an auction system where the prize keeps increasing til someone takes the shift.