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I think the challenge that organizations run into with on call is that the costs of it are hidden and delayed - reduced productivity and lower retention. I thin

I think the challenge that organizations run into with on call is that the costs of it are hidden and delayed - reduced productivity and lower retention. I think that because of this, organizations do not invest in keeping their systems in order. The question is, what do you do about it? At some point things do have to escalate to an engineer, and I don't think it's practical to have a 24/7 engineering team staffed for every service (although having 24/7 non-eng support is very reasonable). The best solution I've seen is having error budgets and on call compensation commensurate with required response times. Error budgets since they balance maintaining and expanding the service, compensation to respect people's time. What have you seen that works?

supernovae 5y ago
If your business requires 24x7 coverage, you should pay for 24x7 coverage and not expect the same people working 8x5 are the ones who will do it "because it has to be done". I once worked for a tech company that said they had follow the sun rotation and i was dumb enough to take the job only to find out that the other countries had strict labor laws and follow the sun didn't mean the US folks would have their nights and weekends, but that the US folks were doing off hour support for the rest of the world because we don't have labor laws that protect our workers rights. I literally had to keep a seat warm from 8-5 my time to do the bulk of my work from 5-9pm and on weekends to "work around the customers" and they failed miserably at making tech work... (fin tech.. where they through money and soul sucking work at every problem)
redisman 5y ago
Shift work has been a thing for decades. I would imagine hiring some percentage of your devs for the night shift wouldn’t be that hard as many people enjoy that lifestyle. Then you already cover the majority of the 24 hours with normal work
- JCharante 5y ago
  Additionally there are a lot of devs who are from East Asia but started working in the US after undergrad or grad school. I'm sure there are many of them who would love to return to their home countries and work during the day time (for example, Vietnam timezone is currently a simple 12 hour difference from NYC tz). Even with a salary reduction they'd still come out ahead through lower taxes & the lower cost of living. Additionally you could still hire devs from western backgrounds. While studying abroad my cookies have led to heavy advertising from turing.com, which seems to hire overseas US devs to work remote for US companies. There's plenty of American devs in Chiang Mai working on their stealth phase startup. edit: It seems turing.com is wasting their ad budget, because they have a 4 hour overlap with US TZ requirement. Not sure why they're advertising to IP addresses coming from Asia.

supernovae 5y ago

If your business requires 24x7 coverage, you should pay for 24x7 coverage and not expect the same people working 8x5 are the ones who will do it "because it has to be done". I once worked for a tech company that said they had follow the sun rotation and i was dumb enough to take the job only to find out that the other countries had strict labor laws and follow the sun didn't mean the US folks would have their nights and weekends, but that the US folks were doing off hour support for the rest of the world because we don't have labor laws that protect our workers rights. I literally had to keep a seat warm from 8-5 my time to do the bulk of my work from 5-9pm and on weekends to "work around the customers" and they failed miserably at making tech work... (fin tech.. where they through money and soul sucking work at every problem)

redisman 5y ago

Shift work has been a thing for decades. I would imagine hiring some percentage of your devs for the night shift wouldn’t be that hard as many people enjoy that lifestyle. Then you already cover the majority of the 24 hours with normal work

JCharante 5y ago
Additionally there are a lot of devs who are from East Asia but started working in the US after undergrad or grad school. I'm sure there are many of them who would love to return to their home countries and work during the day time (for example, Vietnam timezone is currently a simple 12 hour difference from NYC tz). Even with a salary reduction they'd still come out ahead through lower taxes & the lower cost of living. Additionally you could still hire devs from western backgrounds. While studying abroad my cookies have led to heavy advertising from turing.com, which seems to hire overseas US devs to work remote for US companies. There's plenty of American devs in Chiang Mai working on their stealth phase startup. edit: It seems turing.com is wasting their ad budget, because they have a 4 hour overlap with US TZ requirement. Not sure why they're advertising to IP addresses coming from Asia.