4 ms·

For a product that's been around 12 years, I've been surprised at how minimally featured PagerDuty is. Stuff like national holiday awareness, integration to va

For a product that's been around 12 years, I've been surprised at how minimally featured PagerDuty is. Stuff like national holiday awareness, integration to vacation calendars, a better UI for swapping days/overrides, etc. PD schedule checking and trade negotiation becomes yet another thing in the long list of things I need to do when taking a day off. HR system request off, Department Outlook calendar update, PagerDuty coverage check, Outlook out-of-office status & auto-replies, Slack set away, update status AND pause notifications. I suppose that's because as an on-call developer I am not the user. The user, management who bought the product, gets KPIs & pretty graphs, so they are happy.

ethbr0 5y ago
Every delightful, successful developer product is eventually doomed to become JIRA.
- rvnx 5y ago
  A multi-billion USD success story ?
  - ethbr0 5y ago
    That's one way to look at it.
    - jrockway 5y ago
      JIRA is one of those pieces of software that creates more problems than it solves. That's good for the industry -- it means to get an equivalent amount of work done, you need more people. More jobs competing for the same pool of workers means that you have to pay the workers more. That's good for everyone. (If I were starting a company tomorrow, though, I'd use Linear. Nicest issue tracking tool I have ever seen. It has all the "big business" features like roadmaps and story points, with a lot of friendliness for the individual contributors -- dark mode, keyboard shortcuts, a dedicated triage UI. It's so nice to see someone finally get it right!)
      - ethbr0 5y ago
        JIRA is shovelware. In that it solves problems for one user (project managers) by shoveling it onto another user (developers or admin assistants). It solves some problems, but it could definitely do a better job of decreasing overall tracking work required, instead of just moving it around.
dharmab 5y ago
My least favorite thing about PagerDuty is the phone call notification. I drive a car from 2001, and with a cheap bluetooth upgrade, I can do all of these with my voice while driving: - Get directions to anywhere on the continent - Send and receive texts to my friends - Answer and take a call from a human But if PagerDuty calls me, Stephen Hawking's speech synthesizer brusquely yells at me and demands I take my hands off the wheel and press a button on my phone to acknowledge the alert. No voice recognition, no ability to kick off an automated play. It's a time portal to 1997! Even the _banks_ have friendlier phone automation these days!
- dqv 5y ago
  Uh this is user error. Just make the DTMF tones with your voice.
  - dharmab 5y ago
    Whoah there, Captain Crunch!
    - zikduruqe 5y ago
      2600 Hz is a single tone.
jldugger 5y ago
> Stuff like national holiday awareness, integration to vacation calendars, a better UI for swapping days/overrides, etc. Do you shut down your service for Labor Day? I don't. I do agree that trading on-call shifts is not very easy within the UI. Part of me dreams of being able to make enough advantaged trades to end up never on-call, like the padre who doubled his holdings in a WW2 POW camp: https://www.ft.com/content/c523efe6-9973-11e1-9a57-00144feabdc0 https://www.ft.com/content/c523efe6-9973-11e1-9a57-00144feab...
- steveBK123 5y ago
  No, but you could, for example, allocate the holidays equally amongst the team, or as a special class of days with a different schedule like weekends.. rather than just screwing whoever happens to be on that week? The fact that the product seems to have no concept of holidays when its essentially a scheduler++ is a problem. The problem with doing trades which is the default easiest thing to do given the PagerDuty interface is that when you come back from (or just before you go on) vacation you typically end up with extra bonus on-call shift outside the cycle. Delightful! All these things just sort of pile up into the "maybe its just easier not to take a couple days off" category, which is not really a mistake on your employers part.
  - akavi 5y ago
    Oh man, as the engineer who was more or less responsible for PD scheduling between 2013 - 2015, it really hurts to hear they still haven't solved this :/
- tikhonj 5y ago
  Depends on the service? I've maintained a service used for supply chain planning where an outage during business hours needed addressing, but an outage over a weekend or holiday wasn't important. Being able to set up company holidays ahead of time then just not think about it would have been a useful feature for an on-call tool in that scenario.
- dharmab 5y ago
  > Do you shut down your service for Labor Day? Depends on the service and industry. Banking adjacent companies are often allowed downtime off US business hours. Even at big tech companies I've run internal services that had business hours support only (nonproduction sandboxes, non-business-impacting services, long running job services with SLOs measured in hours or days)

ethbr0 5y ago

Every delightful, successful developer product is eventually doomed to become JIRA.

rvnx 5y ago
A multi-billion USD success story ?
- ethbr0 5y ago
  That's one way to look at it.
  - jrockway 5y ago
    JIRA is one of those pieces of software that creates more problems than it solves. That's good for the industry -- it means to get an equivalent amount of work done, you need more people. More jobs competing for the same pool of workers means that you have to pay the workers more. That's good for everyone. (If I were starting a company tomorrow, though, I'd use Linear. Nicest issue tracking tool I have ever seen. It has all the "big business" features like roadmaps and story points, with a lot of friendliness for the individual contributors -- dark mode, keyboard shortcuts, a dedicated triage UI. It's so nice to see someone finally get it right!)
    - ethbr0 5y ago
      JIRA is shovelware. In that it solves problems for one user (project managers) by shoveling it onto another user (developers or admin assistants). It solves some problems, but it could definitely do a better job of decreasing overall tracking work required, instead of just moving it around.

dharmab 5y ago

My least favorite thing about PagerDuty is the phone call notification. I drive a car from 2001, and with a cheap bluetooth upgrade, I can do all of these with my voice while driving: - Get directions to anywhere on the continent - Send and receive texts to my friends - Answer and take a call from a human But if PagerDuty calls me, Stephen Hawking's speech synthesizer brusquely yells at me and demands I take my hands off the wheel and press a button on my phone to acknowledge the alert. No voice recognition, no ability to kick off an automated play. It's a time portal to 1997! Even the _banks_ have friendlier phone automation these days!

dqv 5y ago
Uh this is user error. Just make the DTMF tones with your voice.
- dharmab 5y ago
  Whoah there, Captain Crunch!
  - zikduruqe 5y ago
    2600 Hz is a single tone.

jldugger 5y ago

> Stuff like national holiday awareness, integration to vacation calendars, a better UI for swapping days/overrides, etc. Do you shut down your service for Labor Day? I don't. I do agree that trading on-call shifts is not very easy within the UI. Part of me dreams of being able to make enough advantaged trades to end up never on-call, like the padre who doubled his holdings in a WW2 POW camp: https://www.ft.com/content/c523efe6-9973-11e1-9a57-00144feabdc0 https://www.ft.com/content/c523efe6-9973-11e1-9a57-00144feab...

steveBK123 5y ago
No, but you could, for example, allocate the holidays equally amongst the team, or as a special class of days with a different schedule like weekends.. rather than just screwing whoever happens to be on that week? The fact that the product seems to have no concept of holidays when its essentially a scheduler++ is a problem. The problem with doing trades which is the default easiest thing to do given the PagerDuty interface is that when you come back from (or just before you go on) vacation you typically end up with extra bonus on-call shift outside the cycle. Delightful! All these things just sort of pile up into the "maybe its just easier not to take a couple days off" category, which is not really a mistake on your employers part.
- akavi 5y ago
  Oh man, as the engineer who was more or less responsible for PD scheduling between 2013 - 2015, it really hurts to hear they still haven't solved this :/
tikhonj 5y ago
Depends on the service? I've maintained a service used for supply chain planning where an outage during business hours needed addressing, but an outage over a weekend or holiday wasn't important. Being able to set up company holidays ahead of time then just not think about it would have been a useful feature for an on-call tool in that scenario.
dharmab 5y ago
> Do you shut down your service for Labor Day? Depends on the service and industry. Banking adjacent companies are often allowed downtime off US business hours. Even at big tech companies I've run internal services that had business hours support only (nonproduction sandboxes, non-business-impacting services, long running job services with SLOs measured in hours or days)