4 ms·

> "A guide to being on-call... we all have lives which might get in the way of on-call time" How dare those engineers live a life. They're on-call goddammit.

• lwf 8y ago
  Life gets in the way of scheduled work (on-call). The section you're quoting is about enabling on-call people to have lives without on-call constraints. It's encouraging people to be considerate and cover a colleague's shift if they want to go out and do something, and you're free.
  • uasm 8y ago
    > "Life gets in the way of scheduled work (on-call)." Scheduling 24h work days will inevitably cause "life to get in the way of work". On-calls commonly take a week or two at a time. Stop de-legitimizing work-life seperation.
    • lwf 8y ago
      You're reading way more into both the PagerDuty guide and my comments than was intended. Work-life balance is great. Personally, I don't feel like I need to respond to queries on nights or weekends, take plenty of vacation, and feel empowered to push back at anybody going out of those bounds. Then again, I also work at a company where your colleagues will yell at you if you show up on work chat when you're supposed to be on PTO :) That said, if you're on an on-call shift, and something comes up, that's "life getting in the way". And that's fine. I have separate issues, personally, with how many companies compensate employees for on-call work. But it is an on-call shift, a concept that exists in basically every industry where you're providing a timely service. (plumbers, airline pilots, systems administration...) Unless you're large enough to implement follow-the-sun, you're going to need someone to cover the evenings.
      • deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
  • sbov 8y ago
    Sure. But scheduling someone for 168 hours in a week means life will get in the way. The way its being phrased though makes it sound like its a privilege rather than a basic fact of life. Put another way: recognizing this gets you about as many brownie points as recognizing that eating and shitting gets in the way of your average work day. So zero. It's basic logic and human function.
• tayo42 8y ago
  is it possible to work in software and not be on call? it feels like its not
  • lytfyre 8y ago
    "Software" might be a bit too broad a brush? Embedded development, or stuff that ships and runs on customer premise don't tend to involve oncall, while SaaS or internal services are more likely to.
    • tayo42 8y ago
      Maybe to broad, but for my question its helpful. I get stuck in the web bubble sometimes and need to be reminded there's more out there.
  • wbronitsky 8y ago
    Fortunately for some of us, yes, it is! After years of being on on-call rotations, including while working at Pager Duty themselves, I am now on a web development team with no pager rotation and no use of paging whatsoever. It all depends on the problem domain you are in, and how the company you work for thinks about supporting and operating their software.
  • ultrasaurus 8y ago
    At the end of the day, everyone important is on some kind of defacto on-call (you don't think the head of sales will be woken up for the #1 customer, or the whole marketing team won't be pulled in on a Sunday if there's a big negative story in the NYT?). A major benefit of PagerDuty is making it explicit how much you're burdening a specific on-call person or team. Some of the new stuff around team health is a great way to show managers "hey, we're pushing unfinished code that's ruining my team's work-life balance, we need to fix our procedures" (Disclaimer: former PD employee, was on-call for years & learned how to police my work life balance pretty well)
    • tayo42 8y ago
      I get that things happen, even when i made minimum wage and stocked shelves I got asked to work when I wasn't scheduled for an atypical situation. I guess there's a difference between some once a year oh shit moment and every six weeks planning my life around being close to a computer, phone and an internet connection.