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I don’t understand, is on-call not in addition to your normal duties where you work?

I don’t understand how it could tuen into extra time to work on fun stuff.

On well run teams I’ve been a part of it was always understood that you’re not getting much done on your main projects while being primary oncall

Interesting, I’ve never been somewhere where on call entailed more than maybe an incident or two to handle during the week. I can only recall a single instance that interfered with my current sprint.

From the replies, it sounds like a lot of places have constant fires to be put out by those on call?

That doesn’t sound “well run” to me…

Imo oncall engineer should seize the opportunity and fix that warning alert that’s been firing for ages before it becomes an active fire. So consequently there’s usually no lack of things to do even if no fires occured

Fair enough. I wish we structured it like that, so I could actually spend time on tech debt.

I can't imagine telling an engineer to temporarily take more week on a given week. Every company I've worked at has done it like this:

Not on-call engineers work on 20 story points a sprint (2 week sprints). On-call engineers (if you're on-call for a week) get 10 points of work + on-call.

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