4 ms·

No, not literally. Not everywhere. Secondaries are not your primaries. Secondaries are not supposed to be sitting there waiting for your call to cover them. Th

by sdf4j 4y ago

No, not literally. Not everywhere. Secondaries are not your primaries. Secondaries are not supposed to be sitting there waiting for your call to cover them. That's not how escalation works.

Morgawr 4y ago
I don't know about your company but that's how it is at Google at least. It's not escalating, it's asking for coverage. It's different. Escalation happens if you miss your pages or if there's a larger outage happening (in which case IRM principles apply and more people are called in to contribute, including your secondary/tertiary/rest of the team/other oncall teams). Your secondary is someone who's not oncall but is available in case you need help or you become unable to acknowledge pages for a limited amount of time. You get into a car accident? You have a fever? You find yourself in a family emergency? Your secondary should be available to take over (it's not an escalation). I would regularly organize my commute time in the morning with my secondary because I'd have spotty internet (although later on we stopped doing that because my oncall response time was long enough for it to not be a problem), I'd tell them "hey I'll be unavailable between 9:30 and 10:00 am, can you cover me?" and they'd turn on their pager and take over the oncall duties while I commuted. For people with stricter oncall response times (like google ads or google search SRE), you'd often communicate/coordinate with your secondary for everyday things like "going to the store" or "taking a shower". My friends in search-sre would just tell their secondary "Hey I'm planning to take a shower, can you cover me?" and they'd turn on their pager. Maybe other companies do it differently, but that's how Google does it.
- bigiain 4y ago
  > Maybe other companies do it differently, but that's how Google does it. Most of us work at places that don a lot of things differently to Google I suspect. There's a _huge_ difference between how on-call works in a dozen or so person startup, and hundred or two person single timezone business, and a thousands of engineers across almost all timezones. I _dream_ of working at a place that has follow-the-sun teams of SDEs and SRDs across 3 or 4 timezones. I have not yet worked at a place large enough to have on call secondaries, I've only worked places where the only on call escalation is that the on call person's manager gets paged (and angry) if the on call person hasn't responded within the SLA. (And I've been both the on call person and the manager in that scenario in several different organisations...)

by sdf4j 4y ago

No, not literally. Not everywhere. Secondaries are not your primaries. Secondaries are not supposed to be sitting there waiting for your call to cover them. That's not how escalation works.

Morgawr 4y ago

I don't know about your company but that's how it is at Google at least. It's not escalating, it's asking for coverage. It's different. Escalation happens if you miss your pages or if there's a larger outage happening (in which case IRM principles apply and more people are called in to contribute, including your secondary/tertiary/rest of the team/other oncall teams). Your secondary is someone who's not oncall but is available in case you need help or you become unable to acknowledge pages for a limited amount of time. You get into a car accident? You have a fever? You find yourself in a family emergency? Your secondary should be available to take over (it's not an escalation). I would regularly organize my commute time in the morning with my secondary because I'd have spotty internet (although later on we stopped doing that because my oncall response time was long enough for it to not be a problem), I'd tell them "hey I'll be unavailable between 9:30 and 10:00 am, can you cover me?" and they'd turn on their pager and take over the oncall duties while I commuted. For people with stricter oncall response times (like google ads or google search SRE), you'd often communicate/coordinate with your secondary for everyday things like "going to the store" or "taking a shower". My friends in search-sre would just tell their secondary "Hey I'm planning to take a shower, can you cover me?" and they'd turn on their pager. Maybe other companies do it differently, but that's how Google does it.

bigiain 4y ago
> Maybe other companies do it differently, but that's how Google does it. Most of us work at places that don a lot of things differently to Google I suspect. There's a _huge_ difference between how on-call works in a dozen or so person startup, and hundred or two person single timezone business, and a thousands of engineers across almost all timezones. I _dream_ of working at a place that has follow-the-sun teams of SDEs and SRDs across 3 or 4 timezones. I have not yet worked at a place large enough to have on call secondaries, I've only worked places where the only on call escalation is that the on call person's manager gets paged (and angry) if the on call person hasn't responded within the SLA. (And I've been both the on call person and the manager in that scenario in several different organisations...)