Ask HN: What is your on-call policy? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What is your on-call policy?

5 pointsbwestergard3 comments

I'm trying to get a sense of the range of policies around on-call support or "pager duty" in the industry.

How many days per year are you on call? How often do you actually get a call? How many rotations are you in, and how many other people are in those rotations? Do you get any time off or additional compensation for being on call? Do you get any time off or additional compensation for responding to an incident? If you're a developer, is anyone doing first tier support before you get a call?

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I'm an SRE.

* How many days per year are you on call? About 50. Depends on whether the team is fully staffed.

* How often do you actually get a call? Right now I think it's about 0.3 pages per 12 hour shift. So once every three shifts.

* How many rotations are you in, and how many other people are in those rotations? One on-call rotation with ~8 other people. Fluctuates wildly because SRE is a high turnover job, but right now we're pretty much fully staffed.

* Do you get any time off or additional compensation for being on call? Two thirds for time outside business hours. So a 12 hour shift on the weekend gives a full day off (or the monetary equivalent), even when you don't get paged at all.

* Do you get any time off or additional compensation for responding to an incident? No, except for a potential spot bonus for handling a huge outage.

* How many days per year are you on call? Once week every 7-8 weeks

* How often do you actually get a call? On average two times a week I'm on-call if you don't count stupid alerts (I shutdown a server for upgrade, forgot to disable alerting for that first). The stupid alerts are always during the day.

* How many rotations are you in, and how many other people are in those rotations? 1 Rotation, 7-8 Person.

* Do you get any time off or additional compensation for being on call? One day time off in lieu for each week oncall.

* Do you get any time off or additional compensation for responding to an incident? Time off in lieu for time spend on the call.

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