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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

#41

Post by l8nite »

ljoshua wrote: post #8

My team does Wednesday to Wednesday for many of the same reasons mentioned in the article, and it works great. We switch at 11am and hold a hand-off meeting at that time, and invite the whole team. Hand-off meetings with the whole team work really well (in my opinion!) when you have a relatively small team--we have 9 FT teammates. Often someone else may have been delegated the page or bug that arose and can discuss h…

Same here. Except we do a two week rotation, and it aligns with our sprints. The active on-call engineer doesn’t have any assigned sprint work and focuses their effort on fixing bugs or cleaning up the backlog when they’re not actively triaging an incident.

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#42

Post by glitchcrab »

bigiain wrote: post #31
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.

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 uses our gcal to ensure that it never schedules if people have an AFK entry. It also schedules fairly based on how long since the person was last on-call, not putting them on on a weekend if they were on last weekend etc (we do 24hr shifts).

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#43

Post by pmayrgundter »

This is a strong positive imhe:

"- Step 1: handling it

- Step 2: making sure it doesn’t happen again

So when a major issue happens over the weekend only Step 1 happens during the weekend. Step 2 involves following up with other teams, creating new alarms and updating the runbook. And all that usually happen during the week. The oncall is going to spend at minimum their Monday doing that so it’s better if the schedule reflects that."

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#44

Post by martin-t »

crossroadsguy wrote: post #34
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…

"If they're the owners, do they get all the profit?" When you know you're not gonna work somewhere, might as well have fun raising eyebrows.

Cooperatives really should be more common.

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#45

Post by jeduardo »

glitchcrab wrote: post #42
bigiain wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#46

Post by groestl »

glitchcrab wrote: post #42
bigiain wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#47

Post by Seattle3503 »

martin-t wrote: post #44
crossroadsguy wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"If they're the owners, do they get all the profit?" When you know you're not gonna work somewhere, might as well have fun raising eyebrows. Cooperatives really should be more common.

I mean it sounds clever, but how do you have engineers with no expertise in a system handling calls for it? I've been at places that follow the sun, and you frequently have no idea what to do during an incident, because the person who owns the system is offline. But at least you can sit one a useless incident call during work hours instead of completing your own tickets I suppose.

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#49

Post by thaumasiotes »

tdeck wrote: post #11
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?

At Google we used to get paid an oncall bonus which was calculated at something like 1/3 your prorated salary for the non-working hours you were oncall (IIRC), up to some limit per quarter. For my team a week of oncall per quarter would max it out and net you a few thousand dollars bonus.

> up to some limit per quarter. For my team a week of oncall per quarter would max it out

That reminds me of Amazon's abysmally bad employee discount, which was "10% off anything on the site, up to $100 / year".

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