What I'm having trouble figuring out is if in other companies (like yours) when you are "on-call" for a week, do you work or don't work regular 9-5 M-F? Or are you "on-call" for the entire week, with no other responsabilities, maybe similar to a doctor?
I'm assuming some companies do and some companies don't, but not sure...
If you run a well org... "calls" for ;on-call ppl will be few - but the stress of being mentally "available 24/7" on the on-call position is greater than the stress of tactically dealing with the random event...
Thus, lets assume its your on-call week - and you are supposed to take yur SO for Dinner for [EVENT] (anivv, date-nite, familial thing) - etc...
Do you know how much emotional/mental stress that puts on the employee?
You want your top ops guy avail when you need him in a pinch and he is NOT the guy on call, but the SME who can only solve this X?
Yeah - you best treat them well, to ensure not noly THEY BUT THEIR ENTIRE FAMILIES RECOGNIZE THEIR VALUE.
How many douche-bag managers ONLY think about their emplyees contribution as pposed to the actual contribution their family sacrifices to your fucking company?
Their kids? THier wives/husbands/relationships?
GO FUCK YOURSELF IF YOU THINK IN ANY TERMS OTHER THAN ***HUMAN***
{I AM TALKING TO IT/OPs ON-CALL CULTURE IN GENERAL, NOT YOU IN SPECIFIC. IF You are an ops/SRE/DevOps/IT manager - heed my comment..
This is the reason every employee I have had wants to work with me again.
Family first. And if you live alone, Family First (you are your family. Take care of yourself)
In my case, I like playing basketball, and I can't go to a friendly game with friends when I'm on-call, unless there's more people to rotate for the game(so if I have to leave it's not that big of a deal for the rest)
I didn't mean that being on-call it's great, far from it. I just think it's a reasonable way to compensate the employee.
It sucks to be on-call, but someone has to be. The right people have to be notified of the right alerts and not just notify everyone affected. Also, if it's been a night call, they usually allow the employee to come in late.
I think we as a collective have "dropped the ball". Doctors do "on call" on premise, getting paid every hour, or have ample wait times. We don't have any of those
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I hired a guy as a DBA for an AS/400 system I have spoken about...
I was his manager, yet he was hired by the CIO as a DBA making twice my salary...
He claimed to have done roll-back, backup, general DB management, etc for Bank of America (bank of ireland FYI, Gianinni family)
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He would regularly "false-flag" issues with DB backups syncs, etc...
Meaning that he would report "issues" he 'resolved' during his night shift...
It was later determined he was causing the problems because he was inept, and would report back when he fixed problems he himself caused as successes...
I resented this guy.
He was let go for lying on his resume... but the CIO "vetted" him...
a few days after he was hired, he showed up in a new BMW 5 series... [he was a russian tied to the russian mob] ---
A few years later, I googled him to see where he landed...
There was an article from the city we worked in - same car, same color, same name...
He was found dead - stuffed in the trunk...
Same guy, same name, same city.... same car...
Team wanted to do root cause analysis and fix problems for good but there was always some new very important feature to build. So we never fixed these issues.
The way our on-call escalation worked was something like this: First, on-call gets the call. If the issue is not resolved in 15 minutes, then it is escalated to teamlead. After another 15 or 30 minutes, it is escalated to manager and then entire team. After an hour it is escalated to manager's manager. Other teams/SMEs had to join on-call bridge. Then director, VPs etc. And supposedly if it takes long enough it would escalate all the way to CEO.
I used to feel really guilty if it escalated past my teamlead. And if my manager joined the bridge, she would really scare us about further escalation and make us take all kind of shortcuts like hard reboot servers. She never cared for us to find root cause.
But every once in a while issues will get escalated past her to her boss. And then those issues would become top priority to fix for good.
Soon entire team/department learned this. So we stopped fixing issues as soon as possible. We would pretend like server is stuck, internet connection issues, etc. Wait for call to escalate as high as possible. Some of the teammates would even join online games while supposedly troubleshooting.
Eventually stabilizing our code and environment became top priority instead adding new features. We spent a few months squashing all kind of bugs, added processes like code reviews, unit tests, etc. And after those few months of hard work, our off-hours calls dropped by 90%.
And this is when I learned leadership won't care about our life if they are not impacted by their policies.
Now at my current company I do have on-call but I don't change anything for it. If I am out having dinner with my wife, and I get a work call, I acknowledge it but let my manager know that I will look at the issue in couple of hours. They can get someone else to look at it or wait a few hours. (Also by fighting for quality, we rarely ever get calls after work and management understand why I would spend time with my family during on-call week.)