> "A guide to being on-call... we all have lives which might get in the way of on-call time"
How dare those engineers live a life. They're on-call goddammit.
How dare those engineers live a life. They're on-call goddammit.
The section you're quoting is about enabling on-call people to have lives without on-call constraints. It's encouraging people to be considerate and cover a colleague's shift if they want to go out and do something, and you're free.
Scheduling 24h work days will inevitably cause "life to get in the way of work". On-calls commonly take a week or two at a time. Stop de-legitimizing work-life seperation.
That said, if you're on an on-call shift, and something comes up, that's "life getting in the way". And that's fine.
I have separate issues, personally, with how many companies compensate employees for on-call work. But it is an on-call shift, a concept that exists in basically every industry where you're providing a timely service. (plumbers, airline pilots, systems administration...)
Unless you're large enough to implement follow-the-sun, you're going to need someone to cover the evenings.
Put another way: recognizing this gets you about as many brownie points as recognizing that eating and shitting gets in the way of your average work day. So zero. It's basic logic and human function.
After years of being on on-call rotations, including while working at Pager Duty themselves, I am now on a web development team with no pager rotation and no use of paging whatsoever. It all depends on the problem domain you are in, and how the company you work for thinks about supporting and operating their software.
A major benefit of PagerDuty is making it explicit how much you're burdening a specific on-call person or team. Some of the new stuff around team health is a great way to show managers "hey, we're pushing unfinished code that's ruining my team's work-life balance, we need to fix our procedures"
(Disclaimer: former PD employee, was on-call for years & learned how to police my work life balance pretty well)
I guess there's a difference between some once a year oh shit moment and every six weeks planning my life around being close to a computer, phone and an internet connection.
Yes of course it is. I do research so I don't have any customers yet.
We have support during business hours. 9-5, M-F. That's it.
It was pretty cool, since they practiced 8-hr work days. My only issue was that they were way more focused on ass-in-chair time than productive time, and weren't flexible. At that time, I commuted via bus, and it wasn't uncommon for the bus to be delayed by 15-30 minutes if there were traffic incidents along the route. I wasn't allowed to clock in early if my bus arrived early, and was penalized and documented if the bus was late. So there wasn't a chance in hell I was going to catch the earlier route and arrive 45 minutes before my shift, but they sure were pissy when that bus was late.
Since at the time I was coding in a hallway-facing cube in a cubicle farm, after-hours was my best time to be able to get into "flow" and really get things accomplished without interruption.
We host 95% of the applications that we create at our sister company which exclusively does hosting where there is an on-call system, but it is only available to their largest customers and only by request. Of course company-wide alerts (an entire router that goes down, degraded storage, etc.) do garner an on-call response.