Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday • Hacker News Board

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#31

Post by bigiain » Sat, Nov 23, 2024, 6:45 AM UTC

thebigspacefuck wrote: post #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 th…

Any company that makes it an employee's responsibility to find "someone to cover" their on call time while they're on vacation is a company worth quitting.

I'm pretty sure that'd be illegal here in .au

On call coverage while an employee is on vacation is a management problem, not an employee problem.

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#32

Post by kdazzle » Sat, Nov 23, 2024, 6:47 AM UTC

applecrazy wrote: post #3

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

Lol yeah. My old team had oncall pages in the middle of the night pretty often where nothing was actually the matter. My manager was only nominally on call. In the handoff meetings every week he was basically just like “that sucks”.

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#33

Post by tgma » Sat, Nov 23, 2024, 6:48 AM UTC

siliconc0w wrote: post #27

We do daily shifts with a follow the sun rotation, makes it easier to handle persistent commitments and ensures a bad week doesn't all land on the same person.

Daily might be okay for more ops/SRE types, but it is a hell for a primarily dev team. Can't focus on building shit.

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#34

Post by crossroadsguy » Sat, Nov 23, 2024, 6:48 AM UTC

siliconc0w wrote: post #27

We do daily shifts with a follow the sun rotation, makes it easier to handle persistent commitments and ensures a bad week doesn't all land on the same person.

This! Whenever someone talk about on-call this aspect of that rotation gets swept under the carpet. Whenever I interview I always ask whether they have on-call system (they must if there are servers and apps involved) and if they do whether they have follow the sun.

Most don’t even like the question. For them such questions are red flags or the candidate is not “motivated enough”. Rarely some even have follow the sun policy. They might have one in their HQ, true for a lot of US/EU firms, but their offices in a developing country like India - it’s always something on the lines of “oh, engineers here take full ownership; they are the owners”.

Also, I have seen — 2-3 days rotation with follow the sun is best, week long or longer being worst.

Then there are companies where it could be forever on-call with no follow the sun - e.g. Amazon, Uber (in India at least). That’s another world altogether.

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#35

Post by zeroonetwothree » Sat, Nov 23, 2024, 6:52 AM UTC

In my 20ish years I’ve done every possible day for oncall schedules. I would say each have pros/cons but overall I found it to be a minor difference.

Mon-Mon is nice because it’s a logical time to start something fresh at the start of the week. Tuesday is good for the reasons in the post, Wednesday is similar. Thursday is nice because after you’re done you can relax on Friday. Friday-Friday is less common but can be nice because you get the satisfaction of being done on the last day of the week.

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#36

Post by crossroadsguy » Sat, Nov 23, 2024, 6:53 AM UTC

tgma wrote: post #33

siliconc0w wrote: post #27

We do daily shifts with a follow the sun rotation, makes it easier to handle persistent commitments and ensures a bad week doesn't all land on the same person.

Daily might be okay for more ops/SRE types, but it is a hell for a primarily dev team. Can't focus on building shit.

In some cases it might help. Because then it becomes “natural” - on-call thing. It’s not something someone dreads as in “god, that week is coming”. Also, it spreads the fuck-ups and peaceful times better.

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#37

Post by kelnos » Sat, Nov 23, 2024, 7:10 AM UTC

losteric wrote: post #13

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?

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

Gross, no. This just allows management to ignore problems and push development teams to do feature work, even when everything is on fire and the oncall person is getting paged multiple times per day.

Oncall should be compensated, always. The oncall person should get a flat rate just for being on standby, and should also receive a per-page payout, and that amount should be larger if the page happens outside regular business hours.

Then management will actually realize there's a cost to pushing features and pulling in deadlines at the expense of robust engineering practices. Or they can decide they are fine with that, and paying the oncall person is a cost of doing business they way they want to.

I've seen too many instances either issues they come up during oncall never get fixed, and just page and page and page.

I will never again work at a company where oncall is "just a part of the job". I value my own time too much.

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#38

Post by kelnos » Sat, Nov 23, 2024, 7:12 AM UTC

tkzed49 wrote: post #22

losteric wrote: post #13

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

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

Perhaps not, but at least the oncall person will be compensated for the crap they have to put up with.

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#39

Post by chx » Sat, Nov 23, 2024, 7:23 AM UTC

siliconc0w wrote: post #27

We do daily shifts with a follow the sun rotation, makes it easier to handle persistent commitments and ensures a bad week doesn't all land on the same person.

Not only that but if you have a multiple continental team then no one needs to be waken by an emergency meow. (My PagerDuty is set to a meow sound. So we practice meow driven development: I don't want to hear my phone meowing piteously.) Say, you have someone on the US west coast they can do 10am-10pm while someone else in continental Europe being nine hours ahead can do 7am-7pm.

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#40

Post by RaoulP » Sat, Nov 23, 2024, 7:28 AM UTC

N8works wrote: post #4

I never understood why companies didn't simply leverage 24x7 internet MSPs. They are able to staff 24x7 by spreading the cost over multiple customers and working through the process of making your application manageable by a 3rd party is super beneficial. Most of these companies will also do performance monitoring and analysis as well. They see issues and optimization opportunities across multiple applications and kn…

I hadn't heard of Managed Service Providers before, but you make a good case for them.

I'm finding surprisingly little discussion on HN regarding the costs/benefits of MSPs. Or rather, under which conditions (such as company size) they make sense.

Any big players or companies you would recommend?