Hacker News Reader

> 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.

As someone who is second/third-tier on-call for most of the year: You know what's worse than getting paged when first-tier doesn't handle it? Not getting paged.

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 would humbly suggest that if this person didn’t do anything, either they needed to be better informed of expectations or that your culture needs to change so that they don’t feel the need to ack without actually doing anything.

This is also good advice. I just wanted to emphasize that if the higher-tier process was never to be used, it rather wouldn't exist.

>still the guilt made me feel like a failure and increased my anxiety when I'm on-call.

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.

+1. I am a deep sleeper and Ive missed pages at times that got escalated to the secondary. Nothing major, just something that autoresolved. But the guilt I felt was… incredibly stressful. Because I felt I was letting down people I was familiar with.

You're using "never" everywhere here. That is in my opinion the main red flag here.

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.

almost always there is somebody who's plan is "sitting at home" and nobody minds having the pager in such circumstances

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.

I believe the point was more than if you have a team of, say, ten people, there's always someone who is not busy for some given night, and there's some reasonable trade that can be worked out, the moreso if oncall risk is considered low by the team. Obviously as you scale down that becomes less true.

IMHO the whole notion of "week of on-call" is ridiculous. Being on-call ready is a shift of (hopefully low-intensity) work time. You can do 8 hour shifts, 12 hour shifts, 24 hour shifts, but you can't do 168 hour shifts for monitoring something, anything - that's impractical and should be illegal.

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.

On-call is meant to be for rare emergencies. If you're getting paged outside of work hours on each 1 week shift then something is wrong. It should in no way be equivalent to 168 hours of work.

If there is an obligation to respond within a certain time, and an obligation to avoid certain activities (whatever you imagine that makes you unable to respond) then those are work hours even if nobody calls. It's exactly like a fireighter shift or call center shift where there happen to be no incoming calls, or a night shift at a remote gas station if no customers come during that night.

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.

If someone works an on-call rotation and was told about it during the interview process then I see no issue with it. It's baked into the agreed-upon compensation already.

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.

> I don't see how you can declare what an employer/employee are allowed to agree to.

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.

and that's great in theory, yet incredibly vague. I doubt it's targeting HCI that are predominantly on-call: medical professionals, infrastructure engineers, programmers, etc. I picture it as critical of 996 working hours and similar.

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.

I'm looking at this exactly from the perspective of jobs like medical professionals, infrastructure engineers - I have worked in power infrastructure and have relatives in medicine - where locally none of them are on-call (because the law proscribes this clear boundary); they do 12-18-24 hour shifts of work time, and once the shift ends, they can be (and often are) unreachable. It's not vague, it's extremely clear and simple. Even in a low-volume alert-monitoring position for infrastructure where you might get a few incidents per week (so zero incidents on a median shift) every shift is work time, and scheduled appropriately.

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.

> where locally none of them are on-call (because the law proscribes this clear boundary); they do 12-18-24 hour shifts of work time

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.

I feel the same.

Agreed. I feel like there are significantly different "on call" expectations being discussed in the comments for this post.

The company having that much influence over your day-to-day life during non-business hours every fourth week is an enormous burden. I would want at least 50% higher overall total annual comp to even consider that schedule, and even then it's still only a maybe.

"never" just means exactly when you are on-call.

And holy moly! One whole week of being on-call is way too much.

>It means if you're at your mom's funeral giving a eulogy you leave mid-speech to address PagerDuty.

You should not be on-call while you're at your mom's funeral, period.

While I agree totally that you Shouldn't be, we all know that some places will try to force this on you.

The point still stands whether they try to force you or not. I'm constantly amazed by the lack of boundaries some people in this industry entertain.

I had an awful manager who insisted I needed to "see if I can find someone to cover" for me for a funeral.

I'd tell them that's their job as a manager.

> Finally, somewhere that I fully agree with.

I think we could all stand to learn a bit from the Finnish and the Norwegians.