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I think most experienced engineers realize on-call is a complete fool's game -- you will never get accolades for fixing shit at 2am. Literally never. Your only

by np- 5y ago

I think most experienced engineers realize on-call is a complete fool's game -- you will never get accolades for fixing shit at 2am. Literally never. Your only "reward" will be to become the escalation point to continue getting called at 2am. It's not only mentally demanding work, but also bottom-feeding work that gets no recognition. No one is doing their best work after being woken up in the middle of the night, it's all band-aid hacky fix shit that is being generated. Also in general the type of personality who would tolerate working 2+ hours beyond their working time is probably the type of person that isn't even going to use up all of their PTO to begin with, so I always find those kinds of rewards laughable.

1123581321 5y ago
I don't find your experience to be the general case, though that doesn't invalidate your point. Accolades are an easy intangible reward to hand out so you will often see it given for heroics. Extra cash would be better. PTO is somewhere in the middle. On teams that can rotate through on-call, bonus PTO is more likely to be used than on ones where one or two engineers shoulder the responsibility all year.
emodendroket 5y ago
Well, putting the pipe dreams people have about a global team so nobody is ever working outside regular working hours aside (hope you've considered holidays, guys), what's the alternative? One I've seen is that there's an ops, or "devops," team, that's responsible for picking up the slack instead. But if it's unfair for engineers to have to do it, it seems even less fair for someone who doesn't even have control over what code ships to do it, and to do it without a rotation.
- jodrellblank 5y ago
  > what's the alternative? Let it crash. If you can't afford to pay people enough that someone /wants/ to fix it at 2am, and you can't arrange a retainer for a contractor halfway around the world to be available if needed during their worktime, and you (owner/manager) don't want to do it yourself, then it can be off until someone starts at 9am next business day. (Most products and services aren't life critical).
  - statictype 5y ago
    I think the whole point of the article and the discussion is that many people don’t want to do it even when paid enough. Nobody on any of the threads is arguing that you should not be paid more for being on call.
    - atoav 5y ago
      The issue with being on call constantly is, that you have to basically give up any private life you should have. Your daughters theatre play? Sad to interrupt! Your long awaited weekend trip with your girlfriend? Would be a shame if you had to cancel! The quality of life lost by being on call is not insignificant. This is why being on call should always be the absolute exception and not a reliable, planned in, tool at your companies disposal. If you regularily fail to organize your core business around business hours, maybe you should get someone who is good at planing projects and communicating these plans and put them in charge? Or maybe just close your company and search for a different career path if you are unable to plan your projects?
      - emodendroket 5y ago
        This is kind of absurd. The point of on-call is not to have regular off-hours work, but to have someone available for emergent situations. Since anybody who intends to operate a service with constant availability must always have someone who can respond to emergencies, on-call is the system used by the world's most successful tech companies, not just two-bit upstarts. It's hard to imagine anybody serious about running any kind of online business who is going to respond to an outage on Friday night by saying "we'll look at on Monday at 9:00 PT." It's unfortunate, but it's really not that different from ER doctors, firefighters, utility workers, and numerous other workers working with similar constraints. Besides that, the rotation is known, and planned for, long in advance. So your "long-awaited weekend trip" shouldn't have been scheduled during your on-call shift in the first place.
  - emodendroket 5y ago
    They can pay me enough that I’ll do it but not enough that I’ll want to do it.
- np- 5y ago
  I'm replying to the post saying this is an "industry standard" thing--I'm not saying that there is no disaster scenario ever. Obviously not every contingency can be planned. However, there are certainly signals that a company respects a developers' time. Things like...was there effort put in the product around things that might minimize developer on-call time, like having more user self-serve options, or spending more time on testing, or having a proper feedback loop for recurring issues to be permanently squashes in a timely fashion, etc etc. Are managers regularly a part of these off-hour on-call issues so they're affected too, thus motivated to resolve it? Or does the company just abusively unload all of the burden on the developer and force them to use up their own personal time to maintain a product? Far too often it's the latter, and I think it should be clear to all that this is abusive practice and not "normal" or "standard" nor should any of us consider it that way.
  - emodendroket 5y ago
    Sure, but no matter how many measures you take, on-call still means you have to be available, so it’s a drag even if it’s quiet.

by np- 5y ago

1123581321 5y ago

I don't find your experience to be the general case, though that doesn't invalidate your point. Accolades are an easy intangible reward to hand out so you will often see it given for heroics. Extra cash would be better. PTO is somewhere in the middle. On teams that can rotate through on-call, bonus PTO is more likely to be used than on ones where one or two engineers shoulder the responsibility all year.

emodendroket 5y ago

Well, putting the pipe dreams people have about a global team so nobody is ever working outside regular working hours aside (hope you've considered holidays, guys), what's the alternative? One I've seen is that there's an ops, or "devops," team, that's responsible for picking up the slack instead. But if it's unfair for engineers to have to do it, it seems even less fair for someone who doesn't even have control over what code ships to do it, and to do it without a rotation.

jodrellblank 5y ago
> what's the alternative? Let it crash. If you can't afford to pay people enough that someone /wants/ to fix it at 2am, and you can't arrange a retainer for a contractor halfway around the world to be available if needed during their worktime, and you (owner/manager) don't want to do it yourself, then it can be off until someone starts at 9am next business day. (Most products and services aren't life critical).
- statictype 5y ago
  I think the whole point of the article and the discussion is that many people don’t want to do it even when paid enough. Nobody on any of the threads is arguing that you should not be paid more for being on call.
  - atoav 5y ago
    The issue with being on call constantly is, that you have to basically give up any private life you should have. Your daughters theatre play? Sad to interrupt! Your long awaited weekend trip with your girlfriend? Would be a shame if you had to cancel! The quality of life lost by being on call is not insignificant. This is why being on call should always be the absolute exception and not a reliable, planned in, tool at your companies disposal. If you regularily fail to organize your core business around business hours, maybe you should get someone who is good at planing projects and communicating these plans and put them in charge? Or maybe just close your company and search for a different career path if you are unable to plan your projects?
    - emodendroket 5y ago
      This is kind of absurd. The point of on-call is not to have regular off-hours work, but to have someone available for emergent situations. Since anybody who intends to operate a service with constant availability must always have someone who can respond to emergencies, on-call is the system used by the world's most successful tech companies, not just two-bit upstarts. It's hard to imagine anybody serious about running any kind of online business who is going to respond to an outage on Friday night by saying "we'll look at on Monday at 9:00 PT." It's unfortunate, but it's really not that different from ER doctors, firefighters, utility workers, and numerous other workers working with similar constraints. Besides that, the rotation is known, and planned for, long in advance. So your "long-awaited weekend trip" shouldn't have been scheduled during your on-call shift in the first place.
- emodendroket 5y ago
  They can pay me enough that I’ll do it but not enough that I’ll want to do it.
np- 5y ago
I'm replying to the post saying this is an "industry standard" thing--I'm not saying that there is no disaster scenario ever. Obviously not every contingency can be planned. However, there are certainly signals that a company respects a developers' time. Things like...was there effort put in the product around things that might minimize developer on-call time, like having more user self-serve options, or spending more time on testing, or having a proper feedback loop for recurring issues to be permanently squashes in a timely fashion, etc etc. Are managers regularly a part of these off-hour on-call issues so they're affected too, thus motivated to resolve it? Or does the company just abusively unload all of the burden on the developer and force them to use up their own personal time to maintain a product? Far too often it's the latter, and I think it should be clear to all that this is abusive practice and not "normal" or "standard" nor should any of us consider it that way.
- emodendroket 5y ago
  Sure, but no matter how many measures you take, on-call still means you have to be available, so it’s a drag even if it’s quiet.