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What's the rationale for setting up the on-call schedule? Is the system that unstable? > on call at least once a week, including the work day and evening, onc
by pyjarrett 3y ago
What's the rationale for setting up the on-call schedule? Is the system that unstable?
> on call at least once a week, including the work day and evening, once a month, including the weekend of that week.
> I should also note there is a required 15 min response time to pages. The person MUST be able to be online and fixing the problem within 15 mins of the page.
I've worked a position where I had extra duties on the weekend, so I effectively worked 12+ days in a row many times. I've also been on an on-call schedule like this with a short response time. Both of these severely impact your personal life.
You have to realize that the two most valuable things you can give engineers is their own time back and money.
This is how I would probably try to handle it: To start, it would be opt-in and not mandatory, as this type of responsibility is difficult for those with small children or other family members, such as elderly, needing care. The 15 minute response time also means you should be being paid an hourly rate (maybe even 1.5x or 2x) while being on-call, whether there's an incident or not. This is because it severely limits what you can do -- you're basically chained to your laptop and an internet connection. Anyone responding to an on-call event after hours should also be given a half or full day off the next work day. Weekend on-call should at a minimum be given a day off the following week, preferable two.
- kelnos 3y ago> Is the system that unstable? I'm generally anti-on-call, but c'mon, this is an unreasonable standard. No system is 100% perfect, never needing manual intervention to get things going again when something happens. Any business that has a service that is supposed to be running 24/7 will likely need some form of on-call.
- Silhouette 3y agoIf you have a business that needs to operate 24/7 then you need your Operations team to hire accordingly and then on-call should normally be unnecessary. Operations should be able to fix an emergency that is unsafe, insecure or illegal. Anything else can wait until the next working day even if management might prefer it not to because that costs money. If a business can't or won't make those arrangements (and pay the bill for them) then maybe its management team need to recognise that fully reliable 24/7 operation is not something they can guarantee and they should plan accordingly.
- pyjarrett 3y ago> this is an unreasonable standard My phrasing could have been more clear, I'm not saying you need a 100% perfect system and no on-call. It's weird they're instituting on-call for everyone now, and I'm curious about the reason behind the policy change. I've heard of "on call for everyone" being used as both a response to programmers shipping unreliable code, and also as a preventative measure to encourage programmers to ship more reliable code.