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> Everyone who is on-call or working support during the holidays needs to be given mandatory additional time off and should receive holiday pay. Companies don'
by sc68cal 5y ago
> Everyone who is on-call or working support during the holidays needs to be given mandatory additional time off and should receive holiday pay.
Companies don't want to do that. That costs money. So instead, they developed the idea of a "code freeze" which doesn't cost money (directly). In the mind of management, if there aren't any code changes, then nothing can break. Obviously, this is not the case, but that's not the point. They're not going to pay more for overtime and the marginal cost of deploying changes over the holidays does not justify the expense.
- abernard1 5y agoI worked at an ecom unicorn that did this and had been doing so for about a decade. I think it saved them quite a bit of money by giving extra time off to ops in exchange for their extra work during the holidays. Code freezes (in my experience) don't actually reduce the number of bugs or incidents. I think in all probability they increase the number of incidents and cost money because of the warm up period. But they do shift the timing when incidents occur, and that can be nice if your customers are sensitive to holiday sales. It's also nice to your employees. Paying your SREs a bit more for their tour of duty to the customers and employees is worth it.