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> After being on the team for a couple of months, I was put on the on-call rotation I don't work at Amazon but the situation is very similar to my job. On-call

> After being on the team for a couple of months, I was put on the on-call rotation I don't work at Amazon but the situation is very similar to my job. On-call can be brutal, even if there are no incidents during your week (which is rare.) Just the fact that you have to be 24/7 _ready_ during a whole week sucks, especially when you have a family. During my on-call week, I can't go get groceries, I can't take my kid to her hockey practice, we can't go out for lunch over the weekend, etc. It takes a toll, for sure.

grecy 6y ago
At my last position they tried to offer me a "promotion". More responsibility, more accountability, mentoring juniors AND on call, all for the grand pay raise of $0. "on call" was super, super vague and I pushed back hard on it. If they require me to work outside something reasonable like 6am-6pm, they will pay me at least double for it. No exceptions. I wish everyone would push back that hard, and that on-call was an official opt-in "extra pay" scenario. Needless to say I turned down their "promotion" even after months of them trying to make me take it. Note: I am NOT saying I'll work 12 hour days. I'm just saying if I have to come in early for a meeting for 6am, or stay until 6pm sometimes, that's fine. If I'm expected to come in or be on call at 2am, that's a different story.
dudul 6y ago
The 1st time I worked at a company with "on call" we had this concern while trying to define the policy/rotation/etc. It was always "well, yeah I can be on call sure, but this specific Tuesday at 7pm I have this thing". We solved it in 5 minutes: just have a primary and a secondary that gets the page after 10 minutes. Solved. Go get your groceries, if it's bad luck and the page happens during the 45 minutes where you're out, your buddy will get it.
- dfinninger 6y ago
  Yep. This was the solution for us. The secondary is the next-in-line for primary. Secondary is also first in line for helping out during incidents. This means communication with other teams, a second incident popping up (rare, but has happened), etc. I’ve found that just having someone else to commiserate with at midnight, if needed, really helps the mental state of on-call.
  - dudul 6y ago
    Absolutely. We had the same policy. If primary wasn't sure what to do, they could ping secondary to regroup. We even had a third "last line of defense" which was basically always the same 3 people, pinged if nothing was acked in the first 30mn.
bougiefever 6y ago
There was one period in my life at a 401k administration place where I was responsible for making sure the transaction data for all of the clients made it to AIG every night. For months, I had to do the transmission manually at 7pm each night, which meant not much fun for me ever. I never even got a thank you, and when I finally managed to get it automated, my position was eliminated. At least they gave me a pretty good severance.

grecy 6y ago

At my last position they tried to offer me a "promotion". More responsibility, more accountability, mentoring juniors AND on call, all for the grand pay raise of $0. "on call" was super, super vague and I pushed back hard on it. If they require me to work outside something reasonable like 6am-6pm, they will pay me at least double for it. No exceptions. I wish everyone would push back that hard, and that on-call was an official opt-in "extra pay" scenario. Needless to say I turned down their "promotion" even after months of them trying to make me take it. Note: I am NOT saying I'll work 12 hour days. I'm just saying if I have to come in early for a meeting for 6am, or stay until 6pm sometimes, that's fine. If I'm expected to come in or be on call at 2am, that's a different story.

dudul 6y ago

The 1st time I worked at a company with "on call" we had this concern while trying to define the policy/rotation/etc. It was always "well, yeah I can be on call sure, but this specific Tuesday at 7pm I have this thing". We solved it in 5 minutes: just have a primary and a secondary that gets the page after 10 minutes. Solved. Go get your groceries, if it's bad luck and the page happens during the 45 minutes where you're out, your buddy will get it.

dfinninger 6y ago
Yep. This was the solution for us. The secondary is the next-in-line for primary. Secondary is also first in line for helping out during incidents. This means communication with other teams, a second incident popping up (rare, but has happened), etc. I’ve found that just having someone else to commiserate with at midnight, if needed, really helps the mental state of on-call.
- dudul 6y ago
  Absolutely. We had the same policy. If primary wasn't sure what to do, they could ping secondary to regroup. We even had a third "last line of defense" which was basically always the same 3 people, pinged if nothing was acked in the first 30mn.

bougiefever 6y ago

There was one period in my life at a 401k administration place where I was responsible for making sure the transaction data for all of the clients made it to AIG every night. For months, I had to do the transmission manually at 7pm each night, which meant not much fun for me ever. I never even got a thank you, and when I finally managed to get it automated, my position was eliminated. At least they gave me a pretty good severance.