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Teams I've worked on have not had dedicated support staff, but rather engineers rotate 24 hour support duties on a weekly basis. I have always had mixed feelin
by aprinsen 6y ago
Teams I've worked on have not had dedicated support staff, but rather engineers rotate 24 hour support duties on a weekly basis.
I have always had mixed feelings about "on call". I dread my turn on the rotation because the imminent threat of a prod issue has a psychological impact on my entire week, even off hours, and usually for a day or two after.
If everybody on the team feels that way, maybe it can act as a forcing function for product quality. I've seen this work on teams that already cultivate a strong sense of ownership.
On the flip side, it really stresses me out, and I sometimes resent that I'm not getting paid overtime for 24hr on call days. Maybe that's just baked into an engineer's salary these days, though...
- MattGaiser 6y agoThe engineers at the organization I just departed (at least the ones in the support rotation which did not include me) got paid in both money and extra time off for their time spent on support tasks.
- kevinmchugh 6y agoYeah, I had a job where only certain teams had on call rotations. Anyone in those rotations got an extra half day off per week on call. I've also seen folks spotted extra time off for really gnarly oncall shifts. Folks should push to have such accommodations standardized.
- user5994461 6y agoA half day off for doing 7 full days of extra work. It's peanuts. Better not do the rotation and have your 2 days of week end. (I assume they got zero extra pay and got called occasionally).
- kevinmchugh 6y agoOn call shifts were very quiet and typically didn't involve any pages or interruptions. It was certainly not even a full day of extra work typically.
- jonpurdy 6y agoAnecdotal of course, but a couple of jobs ago I did on-call rotations for a week on every few weeks. I got paid some additional money and time off, but the psychological impact was too great for me and it just wasn't worth it.
- hinkley 6y agoI find myself both applauding that and shrinking away thinking “perverse incentives”. What I want is to run an engineering organization as if you should never have to call us. And if you do you either get chewed out for making a frivolous call, or we’re falling all over ourselves because that thing that is happening should definitely not be happening and we’ll be looking at how to keep that from ever happening again, again.