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Google SWE here. My team has 2 optional oncall rotations that there is a line to join. I'd say there are 2 large motivators for wanting to join the oncall rotat
by kyrra 10y ago
Google SWE here. My team has 2 optional oncall rotations that there is a line to join. I'd say there are 2 large motivators for wanting to join the oncall rotation: (1) money (2) knowledge.
Whoever setup oncall rotation was smart at Google and compensates you well for being on the oncall rotation. Depending on the SLO/response-time of your pager has some impact on that pay as well.
As for knowledge, as the SRE book calls out, we have a primary and secondary rotation. The secondary is responsible for all things build related (keeping continuous integration clean, deploying to production, and being fallback if primary is unavailable).
I do agree that it can be a bit painful to have to carry a laptop wherever you go, but I've lived with it. I guess it's a matter of what your expected response time is that may impact how urgently you need to get a computer started and working on the problem.
- burger_moon 10y agoWhat kind of pay comp do you get for being on call? We have it at my company but it's an expectation everyone is on call and there is no bonus for doing it.
- packetslave 10y agoI don't know that we've talked about the specifics of the oncall compensation program publically, but the broad strokes: You get an additional percentage of your base pay for the hours you're oncall outside of normal business hours (evenings and weekends). The percentage is based on how tight your response SLA is: if you have to be hands-on-keyboard in 5 minutes after a page, that's obviously a lot more disruptive to your life than if it's 30 minutes, so the compensation is adjusted.