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If your writing software or operating infrastructure, you need to be on call. Otherwise you don’t have skin in the game. It makes you a better engineer, and at

If your writing software or operating infrastructure, you need to be on call. Otherwise you don’t have skin in the game. It makes you a better engineer, and at most places increases the quality of your software in two ways. One, you don’t want to get that call at 2am, so you think more about reliability, edge cases, writing playbooks etc. Secondly, when things do go wrong, you perform a post mortem and you get the action items in your stream of work. Additionally you should always track on call stats and use it as a metric in your team health checks. If people are getting called a lot out of hours, it’s time to pull the cord, and sort it out.

Too 6y ago
I'm generally for eating your own dogfood, but if we are to play devils advocate for a moment. If everyone is responsible for maintaining their own features, could it incentive you to not ship any features at all?
yawaramin 6y ago
But the decision to operate the service or infrastructure 24/7 was a business decision, it wasn't my decision. Why should I be on the hook for a decision I didn't make? And if the business really, really wants 24/7 availability, why should that cut into my personal time outside of work? Why shouldn't the business set up teams in multiple timezones for a follow-the-sun model? At the end of the day all this 'you need to be on call for your code' is purely a business money-saving ploy. We are an industry full of suckers, I guess, because we fell for the 'plausible-sounding' explanation hook, line, and sinker.
tonyjstark 6y ago
Is the project manager called too? Or is it just the developer who gets pressured in delivery and then pressured in maintenance, basically at the very low end of the food chain?
- sethammons 6y ago
  We’ve done that: executive team, product owners, and managers. It was only for teams in a particular area of our product. System stability became a funded project.
- willejs 6y ago
  Kind of. Who ever is on call should be able to deal with the issue. Your highest level of escalation should be your engineering manager, VP of engineering or CTO. Your product manager should care about team health checks, and how much you are getting paged, then prioritise engineering time to reduce it. Its about collaboration. If it doesn't work out, maybe you could put your product manager shadow on call too. I haven't ever had to do this, but it could be fun.
burade 6y ago
> It makes you a better engineer, Nah, it makes you a better serf. Are you working at Amazon and getting paid 400k/year? Sure, do whatever. but regular devs making 70k shouldn't put up with this bullshit.
hyko 6y ago
This “skin in the game” reasoning is nonsensical. Highly competent and passionate engineers don’t avoid mistakes because they’re bummed out about being woken up in the middle of the night with the consequences of them. That thinking is just based a cartoon version of human motivation; its twin is the idea that offering money and promotion as an incentive will lead to better performance. Your manager may fancy themselves as a latter day Cortés, but you don’t need to play their mind games (most of them based on the misunderstood readings of an unsettled science) to create an effective and high functioning organisation.

Too 6y ago

I'm generally for eating your own dogfood, but if we are to play devils advocate for a moment. If everyone is responsible for maintaining their own features, could it incentive you to not ship any features at all?

yawaramin 6y ago

But the decision to operate the service or infrastructure 24/7 was a business decision, it wasn't my decision. Why should I be on the hook for a decision I didn't make? And if the business really, really wants 24/7 availability, why should that cut into my personal time outside of work? Why shouldn't the business set up teams in multiple timezones for a follow-the-sun model? At the end of the day all this 'you need to be on call for your code' is purely a business money-saving ploy. We are an industry full of suckers, I guess, because we fell for the 'plausible-sounding' explanation hook, line, and sinker.

tonyjstark 6y ago

Is the project manager called too? Or is it just the developer who gets pressured in delivery and then pressured in maintenance, basically at the very low end of the food chain?

sethammons 6y ago
We’ve done that: executive team, product owners, and managers. It was only for teams in a particular area of our product. System stability became a funded project.
willejs 6y ago
Kind of. Who ever is on call should be able to deal with the issue. Your highest level of escalation should be your engineering manager, VP of engineering or CTO. Your product manager should care about team health checks, and how much you are getting paged, then prioritise engineering time to reduce it. Its about collaboration. If it doesn't work out, maybe you could put your product manager shadow on call too. I haven't ever had to do this, but it could be fun.

burade 6y ago

> It makes you a better engineer, Nah, it makes you a better serf. Are you working at Amazon and getting paid 400k/year? Sure, do whatever. but regular devs making 70k shouldn't put up with this bullshit.

hyko 6y ago

This “skin in the game” reasoning is nonsensical. Highly competent and passionate engineers don’t avoid mistakes because they’re bummed out about being woken up in the middle of the night with the consequences of them. That thinking is just based a cartoon version of human motivation; its twin is the idea that offering money and promotion as an incentive will lead to better performance. Your manager may fancy themselves as a latter day Cortés, but you don’t need to play their mind games (most of them based on the misunderstood readings of an unsettled science) to create an effective and high functioning organisation.