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Comment by itsspring | Hacker News Reader

> On-call wasn’t (and isn’t) too terrible for my team. At first we averaged 1 page every 2 weeks; now we’re up to about 1 a week.

Wow, I wish I had once a week. This is way better than my previous employer/role. I was on-call for months straight, and would get paged multiple times a night, every day, even at 2am, 4am. I had to carry my laptop to dinners, date nights, game nights, etc.

I got burned out and moved careers into a role that never has on-call. I don't get to code much anymore, but I've found other things to enjoy

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Yeah On-call can vary greatly by company, although how On-call issues are handled can have a huge impact on your perception of a job.

At one previous employer, you were on a 2-week rotation for on-call.

But Every time you were on call, it was the same set of problems, always at the same inconvenient times (Mid sunday afternoon, random weekdays but always between 3-5AM, etc.) Admittedly often they were NOPs (Oh, alert came in, but when you check the system it's fine.)

But we didn't fix the false alarms. And we didn't fix the recurring real problems either; the Org's view was that was the entire purpose of the On-call person; that middle child you send to pay the loan shark not-quite enough because you don't care what happens to them.

At later employer, I actually had to deal with -more- on call issues, both in severity and frequency. And yet, I hate being on-call less, because at the very least when we find problems on-call the org puts a focus on fixing them.

I don't know how absurd this sounds but on-call is the only reason I have stayed away from backend or frontend/web development. I had worked on both for few months and ran back to native app development. There might be a place where the company has a "follow the sun" policy for on-call but I haven't come across any.

same. i was oncall 24x7 for about, I dunno, 8 years? I'd share it with my co-founder, so I'd get a week or two off here and there.

It was horrible and in retrospect a really bad decision with the expected outcomes, mostly broken mental health.

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