Comment by elmerfud | Hacker News Reader

Comment by elmerfud | Hacker News Reader

Maybe the better question is why is this a problem? I've been in oncall rotations my entire multi decade career and in the beginning I was frustrated that I was getting called all the time. Now I understand that the reason for that was bad management/owners.

I'm still oncall but if there's a issue that triggers a review to make changes so it never happens again. N+1 on everything, and N+2 redundancy on critical systems. A single failure should be a non-issue. It should take multiple failures inside of a single system to engage the oncall. Human error should be eliminated by not allowing changes during big holidays. Many companies lock down from Thanksgiving to new years.

While things can and will still happen, properly implemented and managed systems should eliminate the most if the oncall issues. The ones that do come up will be an "all hands on deck" kind of thing. People will be less afraid of oncall then they know they rarely get called.

I think what you describe is the ambition of every oncall team. But even when this works really well, so the calls are few and far between, just being scheduled to work oncall means you're more limited in what you can do. You've got to be reachable by phone. You have to be within a few minutes of accessing a computer with good networking. There'll be no road trip drives or flights to see the in-laws while you're the one on oncall duty. Do you think people prefer to avoid just being on oncall duty over big holidays, even if there aren't many calls? Perhaps that preference only shows up in a small portion of oncall teams.

My point is that often times we are active participants in bad infrastructure and bad oncall programs. If you're not calling for post outage remediation plans and actively implementing them, then you're enabling bad process. If management is not budgeting for and prioritizing this work and not paying over time for time worked when on call, and you haven't found another job, you're enabling. Good employees don't enable bad practices, good employees don't work at companies that allow for bad practices. Even in a bad job market there is always room for good employees to shift to better employers. Good employers welcome these kind of changes because they attach a financial cost to on call and then they look to reduce that as a cost center. Bad employers do not track or attach a budget line item to on call outages therefore they continue to abuse the employees that allow themselves to be put in that situation.

Once you've worked on call for a good employer, you'll absolutely understand what I'm saying. The idea of being alone person shackled to a pager biting your nails because it's a holiday becomes a thing of the past.

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