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Comment by teach | Hacker News Reader

Could you go into more detail? It seems like the goal of the magazine is "practical and useful insight into what effective teams are doing."

Is there any evidence that on-call bonuses or compensation affects the quality of work that a team does? Maybe there is, but most of the research I've seen doesn't support that conclusion.

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The question of compensation is relevant to the topic of a sustainable on-call rotation, described by Katherine Daniels in this article:

https://increment.com/on-call/crafting-sustainable-on-call-r...

Intuitively, I suspect that a generous oncall compensation plan would mitigate a harsh rotation to a certain extent, but that engineers would still burn out eventually. But that's just my intuition, and I have only personal experience to back it up: I wanted to hear what other companies were doing, and was disappointed the topic wasn't covered in this otherwise comprehensive issue.

I think employee retention would be a much bigger concern. On-call work is very disruptive and I suspect many developers would be quite unhappy to be asked to do that without some form of compensation. Compensation seems like an extremely important topic when trying to put together an on-call program.

Coversely, you can't dump all of the on call work onto your Ops/DevOps team unless you're compensating them appropriately (or the team is large enough that on call rotations are infrequent). Otherwise, say goodbye to retention.

Compensation, even token compensation, completely changes the game when it comes to swapping or filling in for shifts. There's a HUGE difference between a coworker "doing you a favor" versus taking on paid work.

Effective teams maybe don't have people "on call" but hire people to cover all the hours in which work is needed.

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