1. There is a rotation.
2. There are few pages, preferably the median should be 0 per week.
3. Spurious / non-actionable alerts get fixed right away (with very high priority)
4. You're not up more than 1 week per 1-1.5 month.
5. You subtract middle of the night pages from your next working day, with bad nights resulting in a day off. Being on-call doesn't mean working overtime.
As with most things, the core idea is not bad, it's the execution that matters.
This is important. If you are on-call, you do not have the freedom that you would otherwise have and you should be compensated for this.
* For every hour you're available for on-call you get your regular hourly rate.
* For every incident, which involves you working, you receive twice your hourly salary for the duration.
So companies based her tend to have that as standard, though I'm sure some companies would pay more to stand out.
Being on-call while you do not get called upon is 24 / 7 work because you have to live your entire life around being available.
Like the blog post mentions, grocery shopping has implications because if you happen to have an on-call event while shopping it means leaving your cart to run to your car to address the situation because you can't leave your house without your work laptop.
It means never going to the beach alone on a Saturday because while you could bring your laptop with you, if you go swimming and there's an on-call event you can't address it because you have no way to get notified while you're swimming in the ocean.
It also means going to the movies with an expectation that if you get called 15 minutes into the movie you're leaving. Likewise, if you're mid-date and get called you're out of luck.
It means never enjoying being able to walk around while being disconnected from the world. It means if you're at your mom's funeral giving a eulogy you leave mid-speech to address PagerDuty.
Then there's knowing at any given second your phone can notify you of an event and you have to put the volume at maximum and place it right next to your face every night with an expectation that you could be woken up at any second.
And just to pile on that even more: also dreading that you might not wake up if the page/call comes during the heaviest hours of your sleep.
It's happened to me, I felt awfully guilty for not waking up after a gruelling work day and some pages early in the evening. I was tired and had been asleep for around 2 hours, didn't wake up and the escalation policy took it up to my manager... I didn't get reprimanded or had any bad consequence from it, still the guilt made me feel like a failure and increased my anxiety when I'm on-call.
The only person I ever had to formally reprimand for on-call policy wasn't the one who failed to answer on time, it was the person who, three times, acked and didn't say or do anything else only because they didn't know how to fix it. In all cases I ended up getting pinged by someone else (head of our support team, or a colleague working an odd schedule), after the situation significantly worsened.
Higher tiers are there for a reason; don't feel bad if you've used them, only if you're expecting to use them.
(On the other hand, feeling guilty for making a mistake is also human, and to some degree something that makes me want such a person on my on-call team. People who feel better when they do a better job will do a better job!)
I don't know if this will help with your mindset at all, but as someone who's been listed as the secondary if the first responder doesn't answer: I really wouldn't beat yourself up over it. Self-correction is fine, but try not to let it drag you down too far. We have the same worries too. Our worries are usually "Crud. If I don't pick up, then it's either going to (big boss) or the customer is going to be firing off nasty emails in the morning and dragging me into some stupid meeting." The cause of why we're being paged doesn't really come into play. At most, I might just send a text or whatever to the first responder, to make sure that they're okay. "What if they aren't responding because they were in a car accident?"
If you have a good manager - and it sounds like you do, since you weren't reprimanded for performing a fundemental human function - then they are probably doing their best to look out for you and your interests. When people talk about "not being the boss" or "working as a team" or whatever, generally what they're trying to get at is that "They have your back". They've been in your position and have probably felt that same crush of emotion and worry that you might deal with. They are meant to be the final filter, in a hierarchy of filters, to protect you from those outside elements which ruin your ability to work effectively.
If you put in a sincere effort at your job, you have nothing to feel guilty over. That might be easier said than done, but it really is true. It just might take some time and practice to be able to forgive yourself when you make a mistake.
And if you feel like you could be doing a better job at this, or at that, then you just need to permit yourself the time to improve on that thing, and to remind yourself that you are allowed to mess up from time to time. It's about how you learn from those things.
On-call should be at most one week in four-six. Moreover, with a healthy on-call culture (where stuff is fixed, and alerts happen rarely in practice), usually you can pass/swap on-call to others for an evening, or for an afternoon, or for a weekend, as almost always there is somebody who's plan is "sitting at home" and nobody minds having the pager in such circumstances if it almost never pages outside of working hours.
I wonder if this is an American attitude that exists primarily because we (collectively) have allowed our employers to demand this of us?
Personally, I hate being on call. Most weekends, I spend at least 6 hours cycling. Sometimes significantly more. I go camping regularly. I go kayaking regularly. If I don't spend time outdoors, my mental health declines (really, ask my wife, she kicks me out if I sit around the house too long because I turn into a cranky butthead). Most evenings after work, I run/cycle/hike. I have to run errands. Walk the dog (usually 2 miles). This is all part of my normal "not doing anything special" time at home. None of which is easily doable if I'm on call.
Fortunately, I've managed to build a career in a place where on-call rarely exists.
There are (or should be) some minimum standards of rest time that every human being must get, and being on-call is not it, every employee must get an opportunity to fully disconnect for non-trivial time during every single week. You do your shift, and then get at least 12 hours off (with your phone off) before being available for work or work calls again.
And if you're getting paged outside of work hours, then there's zero obligation to answer your phone.
There's no middle ground. If the employer says that these aren't working hours, they have zero right to ask what you're doing at these hours, much less put any conditions on it; it's your right to spend that time fishing in a remote lake with no cell phone service or go on a date or whatever and not even explain anything without any reprimand when you arrive at your scheduled start of work time; and if they want you to commit to a shift, well, "a shift" where employer tells you what to do (e.g. do not go fishing to a remote lake and don't sleep for 12 hours with your phone off) is by definition work hours.
It is quite plausible that most of the times most employees will pick up the phone and solve reasonable issues, but that's an extra courtesy from the employee, going beyond what you can demand or expect; but the moment you start to require that, or ask an employee to precommit that they will definitely be monitoring their phone for rapid response, that means you're effectively assigning those hours as work hours.
It's understandable that being on-call can be very light work in many cases (not all - quite a few counterexamples in this discussion), so you can agree on different compensation for them, but those definitely are work hours (they definitely aren't non-work hours, and there is no middle ground) and thus any rules on length of shifts and rest between shifts can and should apply also for on-call hours.
I don't see how you can declare what an employer/employee are allowed to agree to. Working an on-call is completely reasonable for a salaried employee. If the terms changed after you were hired and you're bound by a contract (and cannot leave without penalty for a certain timeframe) then things would be very different. But the majority of the HN audience is in the U.S. where employment is generally at will.
Okay, I am coming from a non-US perspective where it's obvious that you can declare what employer/employee are allowed to agree to - "employee rights" means those things which are unalienable and nonnegotiable.
I'll simply quote the universal declaration of human rights "24. Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay." - not only do countries have the right to intervene in employer/employee contracts, they have a duty to do so. If local employment law permits companies to require salaried employees to work 168 hours a week, then that law is literally enabling violation of human rights and should be changed.
In any case I suppose we have different expectations on what's reasonable. If you think a handful of pages per year from my consentual employer is infringing on my fundamental human rights then there's not much I can say to convince you otherwise.
It's not about the number of pages you get, but about the differing expectations on boundaries between your employer and your private time. I do have a strong expectation that employers should not be able to set any restrictions of what people will do in their non-work time, or even ask whether the employer will be out-of-service this weekend, in my opinion that is crossing a line.
As I said, it's entirely reasonable if you get a handful of pages per year and service them - I also have been in roles where I got a handful of night calls per year and happily did what was useful, and I'd expect that in most cases that's okay for most people. However, if it becomes a requirement where I or you must be "on alert" for a whole week, then IMHO that's not reasonable anymore; I answered those calls but I had no duty to be ready for them and abstain from activities that make me unreachable, and if I had a contractual obligation to do so that would be unreasonable (and also a void, unenforceable clause violating employment law). And if you did not volunteer for it but an employer "pushed" this unreasonable requirement on you (e.g. as a condition for employment) then I would actually say that this violated your human rights even if you got zero pages per year; employees should have the practical right to freely decide how they spend their non-work time during the week (and they should have appropriate non-work time) no matter what contracts they sign.
24 hour shifts? Sounds like a real worker's paradise. I'll keep my 7-8 hour days with bi-monthly on-call over that, thanks. I'm glad you aren't legislating where I live; I am much happier with the choices and trade-offs in my life than what you or any euro-crat could dream up to "protect" me.
> if you did not volunteer for it but an employer "pushed" this unreasonable requirement on you (e.g. as a condition for employment)
You have a very different concept of what voluntary and self-agency mean than I do.
And holy moly! One whole week of being on-call is way too much.
You should not be on-call while you're at your mom's funeral, period.
I think we could all stand to learn a bit from the Finnish and the Norwegians.
in my experience, most employer seem to think responding within 30minutes or so is doable, and i tend to agree with them. Usually makes it possible for you to just do things around the house/ in your life, and not having to rush back home when you run into an oncall issue.
I can't imagine less than 30 minutes.
Additionally, I'll never accept on-call with 15 minutes from alert to being on a computer again. It's just too limiting and disruptive of my life. Have to bring the computer everywhere. Any dinner or social event can be instantly ruined. A workout becomes meaningless. I remember doing a swim and having to check my phone every 5 minutes. It's mentally exhausting and frankly not worth the pay.
And sure, it is priced in because the companies can get away with it. This doesn't mean it is right or fair as the price is always going to be in the company's favor and rarely fair to the employee. For example: My brother worked for a US railroad. He didn't have a set schedule. Instead, he got 10 hours rest after a shift and then he was on call. They only closed down on Christmas and New Year's. You were expected to do this on-call work perpetually. The money was good for the area as were the benefits. They advertised in depressed areas without much opportunity, so it made it easier to prey on folks that will accept the poor treatment. I'm pretty sure having to pay folks for each of those hours would change the behavior of the company in the employee's favor.
So yeah, even one hour of 'on-call' should be paid extra, outside of your basepay. Even for companies and industries that aren't being actively evil so that it doesn't happen in the future.
My contract says that if on-calls are needed, I might have to be in the rotation. This clause increases my pay rate even if I'm not on-call.
If however I am actually on-call, I am paid more. And if the on-call rings, I'm again paid more on top of the on-call period. And as the French law mandates 11 consecutive hours of rest, if the on-call rings in the middle of the night, I'll usually come to work later the day after.
If you don't have advantages for being on-call, you're the one being taken advantage of.
Usually those hours are harder to predict compared to working hours so it is much easier to pay for them outside of typical monthly salary.
They were most displeased when I declined this opportunity.
This is impoprtant because if you are on-call, you are working, and if it is during a holiday, then that is one less holiday for you.
This could actually be pretty good too. People would be much more willing to cover for others on holidays
That seems excessive if you're expected to be able to log into your work system within X minutes.
Having to be essentially home, near a computer, 25% of the time (1 week out of 4) is a pretty heavy burden, especially for people who prefer to be out, rather than home.
I have a fair bit of experience in teams with developers hating oncall and the critical issues happen in two camps generally:
- In some cases the org was absolutely open to give them time to resolve issues and automate stuff away (PMs were proposing months for fixes only, and cleaning up boards, etc), there just was no interest until enough escalation happened (creating a massive conflict between ops and devs in the meantime). Even offering to do the work was met with a "stay in your lane" kind of response and no collaboration at all.
- In others the company just did not care, deprioritized tickets until things blew up completely, then finger pointing started and all that nice toxic bullshit.
That's insane. That's around 20% of your life.
In interviews, always ask them:
1. How often is someone on call (typical was one week every 6-8 weeks).
2. While on call, how often do you get paged after hours?
3. What do you do to reduce the number of pages?
I suspect I've been rejected for merely asking the second and third question, but that's good!