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Comment by rednum | Hacker News Reader

Personally, I also ask more questions about on-call:

- is there a SLO?

- what is the schedule? 24h is no go for me.

- is non-business hours on-call compensated (even when there are no pages)?

In particular, I strongly believe we (as profession) should push more the employers for the last point. Being oncall during weekend means I need to seriously adjust my plans; need to have corporate devices somewhere close, etc. In particular this also means I don't fully disconnect from work if I have to carry laptop/phone with me. This kind of stress slowly accrues long term. All in all: staying alert for oncall is some sort of work. A physical security guard gets paid for keeping an eye on things even when nothing happens; it's startling that so many devs don't.

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I agree. I think on-call is a big gotcha of the industry and different companies I've been at wildly succeed or fail at this. Some of it can be more team-driven even if corporate isn't on board.

Good-ish example: - On-call T1 was mostly business hours - T2 during off-hours/weekend - Decently large rotation so you're on-call less frequently than every ~6 weeks

Bad Example: - Escalation goes to another team that likely doesn't know much about the system - T1 24hrs/day - Small team so on-call is fairly frequent

Both of these are still not good examples though. There's no compensation for the on-call hours. The team in my "good" example recognized heavy on-call load and was okay with taking some time off after a heavy on-call week "off books" but that's flimsy at best.

I think this would be a great case for a union personally. Engineers have done very well but I don't think there's enough desire to fix this without a centralized coordinator like a union.

Never heard of SLO before, but I assume you mean this?

https://www.bmc.com/blogs/slo-service-level-objectives/

(I've also never done on-call!)

Kinda. In this context I mean "response SLO" - how much time you have between receiving the page and starting debugging stuff. I think it's also important to clarify; I've been on rotations with response SLO ranging from 5 through 30 minutes to unknown: literally my manager couldn't answer the question "so how fast do you expect me to react" (in hindsight, that was a pretty big red flag about how team approaches production that I missed).

That's a very good point. I always ask when they last worked in the weekend, but I didn't consider work expecting you being on-call without mentioning it.

I would go further and ask for a day off after each on call shift

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