3 ms·

> Being On-Call Sucks Which is why I won't do it. Either hire people specifically to do it, or provide sufficient incentives so that people volunteer. Being

> Being On-Call Sucks Which is why I won't do it. Either hire people specifically to do it, or provide sufficient incentives so that people volunteer. Being a good "first responder" is a skill and not everyone has it or wants it.

hardwaresofton 4y ago
Yeah I think most of engineering just has never heard of a night crew... And it works out to the benefit of companies, unsurprisingly. If you want people to work around the clock, hire enough people to work around the clock. Maybe this means engineer salaries get repriced, maybe it means more and more companies figure out they don't necessarily need on-call. All that said, the status quo probably won't change, there are more than enough engineers who either don't know better or do consider it priced in to their salaries.
- g051051 4y ago
  The last place I worked at decided to cut the ops staff entirely and put all devs on support duty. Hilarity ensued because no one wanted to do it and the suits were baffled. They established a hard cutoff date for the transition, and at the last minute had to keep some ops on for a few months. Before that cutoff expired, they laid off almost our entire division, leaving only a fraction of untrained and unwilling staff to keep the lights on. Even more humor, security hadn't been consulted on this and some requirements when they went to implement it. Any dev, during their 2-week support and on-call period, would have their access to the dev systems removed. Anyone not in their 2-week window would have no access to prod.
femiagbabiaka 4y ago
This might work at a small company with a limited number of SWE’s. Every company over 1k that I’ve worked at that followed this pattern was a shitshow when it came to incidents. Not to throw it out the window, just suggesting that it isn’t as simple as it seems here. The accountability problems surface quickly, even in very talented software engineering orgs. And of course the only thing harder than convincing a software engineer to go on call is convincing a software engineer who was hired onto a team that doesn’t do oncall to do so..

hardwaresofton 4y ago

Yeah I think most of engineering just has never heard of a night crew... And it works out to the benefit of companies, unsurprisingly. If you want people to work around the clock, hire enough people to work around the clock. Maybe this means engineer salaries get repriced, maybe it means more and more companies figure out they don't necessarily need on-call. All that said, the status quo probably won't change, there are more than enough engineers who either don't know better or do consider it priced in to their salaries.

g051051 4y ago
The last place I worked at decided to cut the ops staff entirely and put all devs on support duty. Hilarity ensued because no one wanted to do it and the suits were baffled. They established a hard cutoff date for the transition, and at the last minute had to keep some ops on for a few months. Before that cutoff expired, they laid off almost our entire division, leaving only a fraction of untrained and unwilling staff to keep the lights on. Even more humor, security hadn't been consulted on this and some requirements when they went to implement it. Any dev, during their 2-week support and on-call period, would have their access to the dev systems removed. Anyone not in their 2-week window would have no access to prod.

femiagbabiaka 4y ago

This might work at a small company with a limited number of SWE’s. Every company over 1k that I’ve worked at that followed this pattern was a shitshow when it came to incidents. Not to throw it out the window, just suggesting that it isn’t as simple as it seems here. The accountability problems surface quickly, even in very talented software engineering orgs. And of course the only thing harder than convincing a software engineer to go on call is convincing a software engineer who was hired onto a team that doesn’t do oncall to do so..