Ask HN: Is being on-call becoming mandatory for senior software engineers? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is being on-call becoming mandatory for senior software engineers?

13 pointsingvul16 comments

This is becoming a topic I cannot avoid anymore. As a junior (or even medior) software engineer no one expects you to be on-call, but as a senior software engineer the story changes dramatically. I have been avoiding being on-call successfully so far, but I don't think I can avoid it anymore: my current company is encouraging more and more software engineers to be on-call (paid) and many have accepted already. I have had a couple of job interviews for senior roles and they require on-call availability.

I know that the rationale behind being on-call makes totally sense: teams own their products from conception to deployment and are fully responsible for the availability of their products (this nowadays means, 99.99% of the time, that the product has to be online 24h/day 365 days/year). This encourages teams to write "good code" that has minimum bugs and is performant. I know, it makes sense... but I value much more time than money and I cannot (I don't want to) give more than 40h/week to my employer. I cannot believe one cannot be a competent and professional senior software engineer without having to do on-calls. I mean, I have a damm master's degree in CS and I read dozens of books about programming and software engineering per year; I follow (I try to follow) the best practices and being up-to-date by reading sites like HN, I do side projects and contribute to open source... I just don't want to give away my free time just for more money.

Anybody else in the same situation?

I can see how it’d seem that way. Few years ago a friend who worked marketing referred me to a senior “platform engineer” position in his org. I asked about on-call in the interview, the interviewer filibustered and never really answered the question. I tactfully pressed and made it clear this was an important topic to me in evaluating employers.

They finally relented and explained Seniors had a two week rotation. When it came time to talk about salary I gave them a number about 20% higher than my norm (mind you: the job ad didn’t list a salary, nor a salary range, I was interviewing totally blind about what even the floor was)-effectively, in my mind an extra 10% for every week I was to be ‘on-call’.

Trail went cold, emailed asking for a follow up, recruiter never responded, ghosted. Found out from my friend the following week, when she called and asked “what did you SAY in that interview? They told me you weren’t a good culture fit”

“I asked what the on-call schedule was like”

The way I see it, a bullet was dodged.

Anecdote to put in your tea, if it helps.

There's another HN thread about what questions to ask to evaluate an employer. I think on-call related questions are the most valuable/telling.

Do you happen to have a link to that thread? I'd be curious to see if there are others I should be adding to my battery of questions

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25928641

Yes, or no, or meaningless question, depending on how you look at it.

I'm in embedded systems, not web programming or internet services or enterprise software. We're not "on call", ever. We don't carry pagers. On the other hand, when there's an issue, I'm available. I once got called in at 9 PM because we found a critical bug two days before we were shipping. That's happened once in eleven years, though. I accept that as part of the job as long as it's rare.

So: Is that "on call". In my mind, no, but you might interpret it differently.

I've been a senior dev for quite some time and I was never required to be on call beyond my standard 9-5 hours. I mostly work in enterprise development and, if the systems are critical, there are dedicated teams who're doing the 24/7 support. Furthermore, in the finance sector the developers are not allowed by law to even touch production (to prevent fraud). You could still be theoretically brought into a call to help-troubleshoot, but I've never worked on a system critical enough for that to ever be requested.

Are you in the US? I work in finance. We absolutely have on-call rotations and at least read-only PRD access (usually some limited write capability).

Europe. Interesting about read-only prod access, over here it's a huge no-no for developers.

I feel like that's not the case universally. We have offices over there and they provide prod support too.

Probably, if you're the US company, the US working culture defines how people work in Europe as well. That's what I heard about Amazon office here in Europe - by local standards, it's a sweatshop.

I think it's going to get harder if not impossible. My company has never differentiated from junior to staff engineers for on call. The most we were able to do is convince leadership to make the on call rotation one day every month and a half or so per person over a while week twice a year. One week of on call is very disruptive.

Same for my company. Everybody was on call from time to time. For about 1-3 days.

When you promise 24/7 support, you need to deliver, even in Europe. Even on Christmas holidays. Even with highest degrees and being a world expert. Your customers are also world experts and pay premium.

My problem was surfing. You need to switch duties when you got a swell. You cannot catch calls while being in the surf, but you can while being in the bathroom or in the movies. Waterproof phones might have helped, but it worked out nevertheless.

I think you've already heard the confirmation if your suspicion. But perhaps I can introduce another perspective. Just because you are on-call doesn't mean you go on-call.

I was on-call for a year as part of a rotation. The rotation had 7 ppl, so basically 1wk every 2 months. During that time I didn't receive a single page. This is because I picked a team with low on-call load. Perhaps you can introduce this as a filtering criteria?

There are still jobs that don't have mandatory on-call, but definitely seems to be a shrinking pie. You can blamed devops for that! (joking)

Many organizations who run like this have enough staff to rotate in and cover a 24x7x365 availability.

Off-hours / unsocial hours are there for triage until the full staff can come online and address the issues.

Also, the week of your rotation where you "wear the pager" means that you will often have the "on-call" hangover day. Essentially that is a day off of rest as to not exceed the 40/hrs week.

Obviously this differs company to company and country to country.

"As a junior (or even medior) software engineer no one expects you to be on-call..."

I've been on-call as an entry level and midlevel. They usually give you about 6 months after joining a new team before scheduling you at my company.

Short answer: yes.

tldr; answer: having engineers support their own systems encourages them to pay down operational tech debt faster.

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