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At my company, specifically in my team we do on call, and: 1 - it's one week length 2 - it's paid extra 3 - it's optional, but you're a bit of a bad mate if
by devuo 8y ago
At my company, specifically in my team we do on call, and:
1 - it's one week length
2 - it's paid extra
3 - it's optional, but you're a bit of a bad mate if you don't participate
4 - we try to have at least 6 people on rotation to ensure a full month between on call
Because we do several changes to production per day, our coverage is around > 99% for all our services and libraries (my team is responsible for about 30 of them). We have near zero live incidents, and whenever it does happen the phone rings, it ends up being just some unpredictable spike in load that self heals without intervention.
Because on call is not painful (as it shouldn't be!) and we support each other no one has any problem being on call.
- chrisper 8y agoWhy is it called optional if it really isn't?
- devuo 8y agoit is optional, e.g if you have extra work activities that impede you, family reasons etc. and in these cases it's A-OK! Where it's not so OK it's when there's no reason other than not wanting to do just because you just don't want to be bothered. This is a problem, because during the interviews the person was repeatedly told we did on call and he/she's ok with it. For us, as a team, it's important because if you have the right to deploy to live whenever you want (after code review evidently), you have the obligation to keep it. When everyone shares the load, the load is lighter for everyone. And my experience tells me it just makes everyone much much more responsible and professional.
- thedufer 8y agoIt sounds like you meant flexible, not optional.
- Verdex_3 8y agoIf the interview makes sure that potential employees are okay with being on call, then there are no problems. However, my employer has moral agency above me only insofar as I'm not committing a crime against them (ie fraud or embezzling company funds, etc). This does not include me not performing duties I'm paid for. If I don't do my work, then they don't pay me. This is a civil matter. This certainly doesn't include the reason why I'm deciding not to do optional work. My employer doesn't get to decide that I'm somehow a bad person because they don't agree with why I'm not doing extra non-required work. Eventually, I'm going to be a corpse in the ground. I'm not missing out on my other life goals because you weren't satisfied with my priorities and it turns out that the money you were offering didn't help me accomplish what I want to accomplish.
- hardwaresofton 8y agoWhile what your company is doing is commendable (most don't pay extra or rotate in that fashion) #3 is a red flag for me because it sounds like the overly friendly but in the end passive aggressive and unprofessional atmosphere I've witnessed at startups and midsize companies who pretend they're startups. If on call is optional what's with the social penalty for people not wanting to do it. IMO what companies should be doing is paying extra per hour until they get people that want to do it. As in, increase the price they pay "extra" until someone decides to give up their free time outside of normal development hours.
- munchbunny 8y agoI agree on the preference that if it's not really optional, just don't make it optional. On-call also varies a ton between companies. I was technically on-call all of the time in my last job, but it was a low throughput system. I had to be up at odd hours maybe once every 2-3 months. I slept pretty well. If you offered me free meals for the week, I wouldn't mind taking my turn on the watch regularly. This job, I'm on call maybe one week every two months on a high throughput system, and even though it's only half of the day (we have an overseas team to take the night shift), it's generally acknowledged in the team that your sleep takes a hit and you get no real work done that week. If this were an optional part of my job, you'd have to pay me double for the week (basically a 10% raise).
- devuo 8y agoevidently the pay must be adjusted to how painful the on call experience is. as I said it is optional, no harm comes to you for not participating, and we have people with very good reasons for not helping the team support the code they themselves built and deployed themselves to production.
- devuo 8y agowho said there is a social penalty? There are a number of reasons which I explained in a reply below.
- 8y ago
- partycoder 8y ago> no one has any problem being on call. How do you know this?
- devuo 8y ago1:1s, meetings, general team feeling, retrospectives, amount of whining zero to none.
- zimpenfish 8y agoBut do you keep track of how many people might not join because of the on-call? Or have exit interviews that check whether being on-call was a contributing factor?
- devuo 8y agoIf people don't join because of that, then I'd say that's a filter and I'm ok with that. In the Lisbon office of the company I work, on call was not a contributing factor for the people who have left. The vast majority was because they wanted to work in a different country, and not a problem with the company per se.
- jnsaff2 8y agoI think you should try to tune out the self healing spikes from your alerts as Alarm Fatigue is real and your mind gets programmed to treat it as yet another spike and either not taking it seriously or assuming that 'adding more resources' is going to be the solution instead of properly diagnosing the problem.
- devuo 8y agoBeeping is a rare event in my team, might happen 1-3 times in a week, or there are weeks it doesn't beep at all, and we work to keep it that way.