Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How can I get my engineers to accept being on call?

workplace.stackexchange.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 104 posts

Re: How can I get my engineers to accept being on call?

#81

Post by Silhouette »

morelisp wrote: post #73
Silhouette wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what always gets me about these on-call discussions. It's like there is some kind of Stockholm syndrome thing going on where employees hired to write software are forced into working under completely different conditions to what software development should require and no-one ever stops to ask how badly you have screwed up the whole company culture for this issue to be relevant at all. I recommend investing in…

Assuming everyone can just "have an operations team running 24/7" out the gate is also a bubble. Anyway, lots of jobs with variable demand (doctors, vets, supers, utility workers, etc.) work on a fixed / % of salary daily rate + time-and-a-half when activated. What I agree is bullshit is TFA though, if it's not in your contract, don't do it.

But if you don't have 24/7 Operations coverage then you probably aren't really able to run fully reliably all the time anyway. And that is perfectly OK and normal for smaller and newer businesses. They just need to stop kidding themselves that they can operate at that level by exploiting their dev team.

Re: How can I get my engineers to accept being on call?

#82

Post by simne »

From my own experience, I understand, being on call could be important for engineers, but CEO MUST understand, not all people could accept this.

So, in real life, need agile approach.

Some people just accept to be on call all time, you could consider them as your core team with appropriate benefits and value them, and respect them, really.

Second group of people could accept receive calls during their shift. This is also not bad. Value this.

And exists people, who are good workers, make great value, but could be on call very limited time or nearly no time. You should decide, with them individually, how you will work. It is really possible, some very valuable people will not be on call at all.

Re: How can I get my engineers to accept being on call?

#83

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

Apreche wrote: post #16

One other solution nobody has suggested. Hire lots and lots of staff, and work in shifts. Have enough people on each shift that even when people use PTO or fall ill, someone is always working. Nobody ever has to be on call. Instead everyone works normal hours, but someone is always available. You’ll still have to pay extra if you want people working on holidays, though.

What about weekends?

Re: How can I get my engineers to accept being on call?

#84

Post by jki275 »

antisthenes wrote: post #75
jki275 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As another reply said, you can't afford me. I did on call 24/7/365 for 23 years. I'll never do it again. My phone goes silent in the evening and doesn't come online again until I get up to come to work. That's never going to change. I'm not 20 anymore, I don't function on no sleep.

> I did on call 24/7/365 for 23 years. I hope you made enough money to retire comfortably. That sounds like utter hell.

Not even close. Military enlisted. Living the good life writing software 9 to 5 now though.

Re: How can I get my engineers to accept being on call?

#85

Post by pyjarrett »

kelnos wrote: post #66
pyjarrett wrote: post #59

What's the rationale for setting up the on-call schedule? Is the system that unstable? > on call at least once a week, including the work day and evening, once a month, including the weekend of that week. > I should also note there is a required 15 min response time to pages. The person MUST be able to be online and fixing the problem within 15 mins of the page. I've worked a position where I had extra duties on the…

> Is the system that unstable? I'm generally anti-on-call, but c'mon, this is an unreasonable standard. No system is 100% perfect, never needing manual intervention to get things going again when something happens. Any business that has a service that is supposed to be running 24/7 will likely need some form of on-call.

> this is an unreasonable standard

My phrasing could have been more clear, I'm not saying you need a 100% perfect system and no on-call.

It's weird they're instituting on-call for everyone now, and I'm curious about the reason behind the policy change. I've heard of "on call for everyone" being used as both a response to programmers shipping unreliable code, and also as a preventative measure to encourage programmers to ship more reliable code.

Re: How can I get my engineers to accept being on call?

#87

Post by nwallin »

cj wrote: post #37
kelnos wrote: post #18

I've done a fair bit of on-call during my career, but I wouldn't do it anymore (at least not for any dollar amount a company would likely pay). I value my time outside work -- and my sleep -- too much. The standard in SV seems to be that on-call is required and uncompensated (some companies will dishonestly try to suggest that your salary is higher than it would be otherwise). This is gross, and we shouldn't stand fo…

I agree if on call is being triggered regularly. I strongly disagree if events that would trigger on call happen rarely (e.g. once per year). Many companies have stable infrastructure but just need the extremely occasional coverage for things that rarely, if ever, happen. I’ve seen people overreact when on call has been introduced, probably from negative experiences at prior jobs. As long as the on call events happen…

The problem with being on-call isn't that you're working, the problem with being on-call is that you aren't not working.

You can't be on-call and go to a place you're not allowed to have your cell phone on. You can't be on-call and drink alcohol. (or other substances of various legalities) You can't be on-call and go camping in a wilderness location that may not have cell coverage. Depending on the circumstances, you may need to lug your work laptop around in your backpack.

Re: How can I get my engineers to accept being on call?

#88

Post by EPWN3D »

> Should we just PIP the engineer

No, fire them without cause like a grown up and take the hit to your unemployment insurance. Don't put them through some three-ring circus act masquerading as employee development. It's undignified and disrespectful. You and the employee have a disagreement over the job description -- this not performance related. Don't try and spin it as that.

It amazes me that these B-school pricks managed to enshrine at-will employment across the country, and they still won't just fucking fire people like adults. No, instead we got one of the worst MBA-isms visited on corporate America, the PIP. Fucking cowards, the lot of them.

Re: How can I get my engineers to accept being on call?

#89

Post by jjav »

kelnos wrote: post #18

I've done a fair bit of on-call during my career, but I wouldn't do it anymore (at least not for any dollar amount a company would likely pay). I value my time outside work -- and my sleep -- too much. The standard in SV seems to be that on-call is required and uncompensated (some companies will dishonestly try to suggest that your salary is higher than it would be otherwise). This is gross, and we shouldn't stand fo…

To me the most important factor to tolerate on-call duty is that I must have 100% authority to fix the things that would ever make me be paged.

Under such an arrangement, I control my destiny (not 100%, but close enough). If I can make the code so robust and so easy to diagnose that I'm very likely to never ever be paged, I'm ok being on call.

But if there is some psychopath product manager making engineering decisions above engineering, forcing to increase tech debt constantly, guaranteeing constant outages and thus constant on-call pages then a big fat no. I won't be on call.

Re: How can I get my engineers to accept being on call?

#90

Post by johnnyanmac »

troupe wrote: post #9

The whole, "How can I get people to do X when they don't want to do it for $Y?" is just a funny question. It is like asking, "How do I buy a sandwich when no one wants to sell me one for $1?" Of course if everyone except a single employee IS willing to do X for $Y then the company many choose to replace them.

>"How do I buy a sandwich when no one wants to sell me one for $1?

Easy, you learn how to make your own sandwich. buy bulk and you amortize the cost to less than $1/sandwich

Of course, technical expertise isn't as easy as putting condiments between bread. Guess you gotta pay your labor if you're not willing to do it yourself.

Post reply on HN