Developer on Call

It's your point of view. I know lots of developers who don't care about extra days off, they just want the additional $$ for being on call (if there are no issues it's just easy money). The same for the rare occasion they need to handle some issue (night overtime is paid x2). We have an on-call schedule in our dept which is filled up on a voluntary basis. Every time we add new months to it (it's Google spreadsheet), they are "sold out" within few hours.

As my company has grown (I am an early employee), our on call system has gone through a few changes.

A decade ago, we had a physical pager that we handed off every week. The pager was tied to our ticketing system and anyone could create a ticket for it. It worked for the most part, but every now and then the "entire system is down" issue would turn out to by Mary in accounting's internet cable was loose.

Then we staffed up and hired a 24/7 on call support staff. We also went from four small Dev teams to dozens. These teams never felt the impact of their decisions on the support staff and would happily thtow code over the wall. They didn't feel like it was their job. Having worked in those trenches, I spent a good portion of my time trying to make it easier for them to troubleshoot our applications.

Over the past couple of years, we've moved to a more modern model. We still have the dedicated first line of defense to handle things outside of business hours. But if something happens and they can't handle it, there are on call rotations for all products they can escalate to. Eventually that escalation still makes it up to me, but having the teams in it has made it more likely that they will put the effort in to making support easier.

I think it is important to have developers support their applications as long as the culture and process allow for it to be sustainable. Part of that is making sure the people on the rotation actually understand the systems they are supporting. Another is making sure each event results in learning and hopefully changes that prevent it. And another is recognizing that when someone has been up in the middle of the night, their productivity will decrease and they should be allowed to recover.

Here's how my company does it:

- $200 for being available for the week. Must be within 1hr of the office should the call require you to come in to use special equipment

- All calls first are screened by our Sales team: "Can this wait until business hours tomorrow? There is a substantial call out fee"

- 1hr minimum for phone support

- 3hr minimum for us logging in with our laptops

- 1.5x rate for calls during "days" (7am-10pm Mon->Sat)

- 2.0x rate for nights/sundays/stats

I've done this for like... 4 years now? Its pretty decent overall, you can get some really great weeks where customers just want things fixed NOW so a lazy Sunday watching Netflix turns into 6hr @ 2.0x rate (even though you only worked for 15 minutes). What this creates is an environment where most of the guys on rotation are happy to swap you calls if you have something going on.

And with all that laid out, I want to say I agree with a lot of what the article says. Problems only exist for so long before people take the effort to fix them. Lots more time goes into testing and making sure we have a clear rollback plan when major installs go in. I think its pushed people to follow my lead a lot more in making very verbose logging options so people not familiar with the project are able to quickly pull up logs and understand the issues.

Overall, I recommend it. I can see how it may not fit in different work environments, but I find it a great addition to my job both in giving me a wider breadth of understanding the work my company does and a bit of extra pay.

I see where you are coming from, but unless it was something I specifically agreed to in my employment contract I wouldn't be "on call" during normal sleeping hours, either.

(I was on call every 3rd week back in my biomed days but I was explicitly compensated above my normal pay for this)

Bug fixing is very different from being on-call. I don't see the correlation between getting a full night's sleep each night and being an "architecture astronaut".