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I would interpret the 6-8 number as the number of people actually on the rotation, so excluding those who are not yet trained. >they are getting escalated to t

I would interpret the 6-8 number as the number of people actually on the rotation, so excluding those who are not yet trained. >they are getting escalated to the person on rota and then escalated to you/team (it's rare than one man can fix/debug much alone) This is probably true at first, but over time a team can build up knowledge with better runbooks. When I first joined my team's on-call, my tech lead was very clear that if I wasn't sure what to do, I should just page her or the subject matter expert on the team without hesitating. For each time this happened, we went over the response in a postmortem and added instructions about how to diagnose and fix to the runbook, so the next person to get paged for a similar reason could follow those instead.

user5994461 6y ago
I agree with what you say on principles, the challenge is doing it in the real world with real people and real organizations. You're practically saying that the tech lead and manager are on call 24/7 because they can be called anytime. Are they okay with that? can they actually do something about the pages/runbooks? (in many organizations it's not that simple). What's the average tenure in tech? Something like a year (you can surely imagine that it gets shorter with bad oncall). You're constantly having new joiners (and leavers). It's not as simple as there being 6 people at the ready at all times. Practically the team starts from zero and have to ramp up to 6 members, how easy is it to recruit 6 dev/ops/sre? It's not that easy and it takes a lot of time and they leave. Outside of a few large organization, teams/department might never reach the size where on call is bearable.