The calls themselves were no big deal.
I was never on call but I have a friend who was. Like you mentioned, it plays a huge role in how you live your life. That lingering feeling of they can call you any second haunts you day in and day out.
Even going to the movies must be a terrible experience? You either feel guilty for turning your pager off, or you spend the movie just ruminating about how it will end early for you if you get called.
How do you even sleep at night knowing that someone might call you any second? Sounds worse than prison honestly.
Sounds like you need to renegotiate that. When I'm on call I don't get paid 9-5. There's a rather nice on-call bonus which pretty much means I get paid the full 24hrs. Might also depend on the country, some have laws around these kinds of things. For example, I can only be on-call for a 1 week stretch and have to be given a (paid) day off after. I can also not be on-call again for another couple of days.
> I was never on call but I have a friend who was. Like you mentioned, it plays a huge role in how you live your life. That lingering feeling of they can call you any second haunts you day in and day out.
If being on-call gives you this lingering feeling of doom then don't be on-call. If your systems are in that much of a fucked up state then you push back until that's sorted. Sometimes you need to let stuff burn. Being on-call does not have to equal being in a constant state of stress on the verge of panic attacks.
> Even going to the movies must be a terrible experience? You either feel guilty for turning your pager off, or you spend the movie just ruminating about how it will end early for you if you get called.
I don't go to the movies when I'm on-call. Turning your pager off at that point is irresponsible and not what I'm being paid for. In most companies you're only on-call for short periods at a time, it doesn't take over your life. You just go to the movies the day after, just like you'd plan any other activity and overlapping commitment.
> How do you even sleep at night knowing that someone might call you any second? Sounds worse than prison honestly.
By using Quiet Hours on your phone correctly and configuring the numbers that pages can come from to always go through. You get to bed and you sleep. The first few times you might sleep a bit less over it. Eventually you get the hang of it. A big part in this is knowing that you don't get paged for random crap but only ever when there's something truly wrong that can't wait until the next morning. Correctly behaving systems and not too trigger-happy alerting are crucial to this.
Also notice that it is impossible to achieve in the real world. What company will have enough people for rotation + systems that barely fail + major bonus for oncall + time off + people who are decisively not trigger happy against your pager...
It's certainly not easy to get to that point but it's entirely possible. Everything on the post you're replying to is how on-call works for me. It's not some imaginary world, it's reality.
Go to SRECon for example and talk to people there. You'll be surprised. Just because you haven't experienced it (yet) doesn't make it impossible.
Met way too many people who consider their on-call to be okay. And when digging deeper, they're being totally exploited and I wouldn't touch their positions/teams/organizations with a 10 foot pole.
People who care about on-call moved to contracting or positions where they are not on call, they're not coming back. I did and I ain't coming back ;)
the only downside is a small rotation (3 people 1 week each) and some serious scaling issues which have made the pervious few months much worse than earlier ones. though we also have management buy in to fix the less than good parts.
Whoever setup oncall rotation was smart at Google and compensates you well for being on the oncall rotation. Depending on the SLO/response-time of your pager has some impact on that pay as well.
As for knowledge, as the SRE book calls out, we have a primary and secondary rotation. The secondary is responsible for all things build related (keeping continuous integration clean, deploying to production, and being fallback if primary is unavailable).
I do agree that it can be a bit painful to have to carry a laptop wherever you go, but I've lived with it. I guess it's a matter of what your expected response time is that may impact how urgently you need to get a computer started and working on the problem.
We have it at my company but it's an expectation everyone is on call and there is no bonus for doing it.
You get an additional percentage of your base pay for the hours you're oncall outside of normal business hours (evenings and weekends). The percentage is based on how tight your response SLA is: if you have to be hands-on-keyboard in 5 minutes after a page, that's obviously a lot more disruptive to your life than if it's 30 minutes, so the compensation is adjusted.
You can't be oncall 24hours. That's broken. Human beings need sleep. An oncall rotation that has an individual oncall for 24 hours is a broken thing. And depending on the country it also rightfully violates labour laws.
Second you get paid when you work. Oncall is work. Now it might be less demanding work, so it might get paid a bit less than the 9-5 part, but it has to get paid. Do work, get paid. Simple rule, people should stop fucking with it. And again, labour laws show up here.
If you're oncall you can't shut the pager off. If shutting the pager off is a thing people"oncall" do it's a broken oncall culture. Since it's often a consequence of the first two problems, those must be fixed first.
You should not be asleep when you're oncall. Same issues as the last problem; same likely causes.
You also shouldn't be oncall often. One 12 hour / 7 day shift every six weeks is fine.
Also pages should not be common. They should be for real, actual issues. If you regularly get paged more than once per shift, your oncall shift is broken.
I do agree that being oncall can be an unpleasant experience, but it's also a motivation to structure your service to not page you in the middle of the night.
Apparently if you write software to their invariably insane and wrong and totally misunderstood specifications they gain the right to bother you every time anything goes wrong with it. Usually it's 100% their own stupid fault.
Whether this happens at 6am, 2pm, 8pm is apparently all your fault and you, as a developer, should not just fix this, sacrifice your time and drop what you're doing, but you are also expected to pay for this.
So let me just say:
1) No
2) if you want this, you're paying extra, and sorry to say, but a LOT extra (10% of a month's consultancy rate for 2h + incidents which DO NOT include new features. Furthermore it is expected that 2 out of 3 months you're paying for checking if the monitoring system is working, nothing more. If it is more, price goes up)
3) if you disagree on this, we have contracts, AND labour law that disagrees with your assessment that "SWEs" aren't paid for 9-5 hours.
4) Obviously we can talk about this. But either modifications to software or improvements in general will come at a cost. I'm very willing to discuss, design, implement, even hire a team etc. for you to do this, but we need to understand eachother : it's not free.
I don't know how it works at Google, but I've seen these attitudes often at large companies. And ... euhm ... you can find some other poor victim to pull this crap with.
I think there are plenty of job sectors where the only options above entry level are middle management roles that have serious drawbacks like this. I accepted it because it seemed like the only way to climb the ladder.
I really miss that job but the oncall was just fucking the worst and has caused me to turn down future jobs because of I was burned by doing on call.