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Comment by aaomidi | Hacker News Reader

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aaomidi·

You could hire another shift of support engineers for those times...

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My employer does this to provide 24h support:

- one shift predominantly in UTC-8 -> US West Coast

- one shift predominantly in UTC+8 ~> Singapore/Australia West Coast

- one shift around UTC+0 -> Europe

For 8h days, it works ok. I think that shorter days could work, if the shifts were split. There are also some offices outside of the 3 major time zones, which also fills in gaps.

Of course, dev availability is not usually 24/7 but there are two layers of support before issues reach dev.

To be fair, I've worked for a company that initially staffed people on all shifts round the clock, and hand-offs from one shift to another are an issue.

Eventually they realized they could just have people on days in the US and an opposite schedule in India instead of three US shifts. But communication certainly didn't improve.

which costs more money. Getting more work out of fewer people thereby cutting costs and increasing shareholder value is the capitalist thing to do. Not saying it's right or wrong.

No, that's like saying cheating people or killing them is the capitalist thing to do. Defending capitalism becomes indistinguishable from attacking it; either way, the assertion is false. A market economy is a way of optimizing welfare through profit-seeking, but it has no meaning or existence or justification without constraints and boundary conditions. What constraints we should have is a political question completely separate from whether we should have private ownership of capital and free markets.

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