1–10 of 24 posts
I'm doing some field research on unique ways on-call rotations can be unhealthy. It would be great to hear some anecdata from the community about /why/ you feel your on-call rotation sucks - and I figure it would be even better to experience it firsthand :)
I do understand asking to join/shadow your rotation is probably not practical however I am 100% serious and happy to sign whatever.
Cheers & may your pager stay silent
You know it's broken, everyone knows it's broken but it keeps alerting.
You know it's broken, everyone knows it's broken but it keeps alerting.
And you're allocated the time for on-call, salaried for it, but never assigned the task to fix the damn thing. So instead, you and your team burn maybe-I-have-to-get-up-at-night-time instead of definitely-attempting-to-fix-it-time.
I stopped hitting snooze as I got older. I either wake up or give up and sleep in..
Inadequate staff is the only reason on-call exists. Sure, people might be mostly sitting around all night being paid and not being terribly busy.
But if a company needs someone at night, they need someone at night. Companies getting away with not paying for that is why oncall sucks.
In other words oncall sucks because companies don’t pay for solving the problems that require it. There’s no self correcting feedback.
A tool can’t fix that and oncall is not inevitable. Good luck.
On-call issues are staffing issues not tools issues. Inadequate staff is the only reason on-call exists. Sure, people might be mostly sitting around all night being paid and not being terribly busy. But if a company needs someone at night, they need someone at night. Companies getting away with not paying for that is why oncall sucks. In other words oncall sucks because companies don’t pay for solving the problems th…
When I started people were paid for any hours they worked on-call. By the end, the company changed the policy so on-call was part of base pay. For those who were on-call during the change over, their last year of on-call pay was averaged and added to their salary. For everyone who came after that, they got screwed (that includes me).
Once I changed to the day shift I got called a few times for on-call. Every single time, I documented what I did to fix it, as I did it, and handed it off to the ops team. Or in some cases I automated the fix. I have 0 tolerance for being called in my free time. I don’t care what the boss says my priorities are, if I’m being called at night, stopping that in its tracks is my #1 priority. If I ever get called two times for the same issue, that’s my fault. So far, it’s never happened.
On-call issues are staffing issues not tools issues. Inadequate staff is the only reason on-call exists. Sure, people might be mostly sitting around all night being paid and not being terribly busy. But if a company needs someone at night, they need someone at night. Companies getting away with not paying for that is why oncall sucks. In other words oncall sucks because companies don’t pay for solving the problems th…
But as long as the expected cost of downtime outweighs the financial cost of keeping someone available to fix it, on-call in some form will be inevitable. (There are a lot of instances where the cost doesn't make sense, and we should just accept the system being broken until 9am)
I don't think on-call needs to suck though. IMO "staffing issues" (whether it's headcount, time, competing priorities, etc) are resourcing issues and I believe better tooling can absolutely help with that - either by reducing the resources required to fix it or by making the cost of the issues quantifiable. Thanks for the good luck :)
On-call issues are staffing issues not tools issues. Inadequate staff is the only reason on-call exists. Sure, people might be mostly sitting around all night being paid and not being terribly busy. But if a company needs someone at night, they need someone at night. Companies getting away with not paying for that is why oncall sucks. In other words oncall sucks because companies don’t pay for solving the problems th…
I used to work the night shift handling most off hours issues for a a couple dozen teams. We would occasionally have to call someone, but not that often compared to the alternative. Most of the time it was just to get sign off on what we already planned to do. When I started people were paid for any hours they worked on-call. By the end, the company changed the policy so on-call was part of base pay. For those who we…
I've yet to hear of any alternative compensation model that actually works. Just pay people in their choice of money or time off in lieu. Sorry to hear you got screwed.
> Every single time, I documented what I did to fix it, as I did it, and handed it off to the ops team. Or in some cases I automated the fix. I have 0 tolerance for being called in my free time. I don’t care what the boss says my priorities are, if I’m being called at night, stopping that in its tracks is my #1 priority.
100% agree, I think people are far too tolerant of being paged. Especially management - the productivity impact of constant interrupts is huge. In a previous job one of my favourite things to do was go out to teams and just disable alerts they said were noisy or unactionable. If there was any pushback/consequence I was happy to accept responsibility (but never had to).