3 ms·

At $FANNG, we have a surprisingly complex tool to handle scheduling oncall and I don't I have seen a public equivalent so there is probably an opportunity there

At $FANNG, we have a surprisingly complex tool to handle scheduling oncall and I don't I have seen a public equivalent so there is probably an opportunity there. Ideally you to optimize around a number of factors - vacations (which can be auto populated) for one but also fairness, shift closeness (some labor laws here), holidays, or individual preferences (e.g I like to hike on the weekends). You then also need a tool for short-term trades/overrides to basically poll the team to see who can take/trade the shift to avoid the diffusion of responsibility of yelling into a slack chennel and complexity of negotiating trades. What is nice about this is that we can setup a daily oncall so if you have a re-occuring weekly obligation that is incompatible with being oncall we can set it up so you never get scheduled for that day (provided there is enough slack for vacations and so on).

OJFord 4y ago
When I used one of these (we used VictorOps^) what it was really missing was 'fairness' as you say in the 'takes/trades'. We were rarely called and paid handsomely for it, so although nobody vocalised it, there was definitely a rush to grab it (because that was the 'system') if someone announced they had to put one up for grabs (due to holiday clash or whatever). Really I think that should have automatically de-allocated some future rotation of the taker's, and definitely would've helped if it hooked into the holiday calendaring system, so anything booked far enough in advance was already avoided. (^Not to slam VictorOps specifically, for all I know we just didn't have it configured well and it is capable of all that.)
quickthrower2 4y ago
What is FANNG? Facebook, Amazon, Neural Nets & Google?