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Comment by glitchcrab | Hacker News Reader

Could not agree more, any company I've worked at with an on-call rotation has always ensured that staff are not scheduled when they have holiday booked. The only time an employee needed to find their own cover is if something unexpected came up during their on-call period and they needed a few hours out (like an emergency visit to the doctor with a child etc).

At my current job we have an automated scheduler which uses our gcal to ensure that it never schedules if people have an AFK entry. It also schedules fairly based on how long since the person was last on-call, not putting them on on a weekend if they were on last weekend etc (we do 24hr shifts).

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> The only time an employee needed to find their own cover is if something unexpected came up during their on-call period and they needed a few hours out (like an emergency visit to the doctor with a child etc).

That's exactly the time where "finding your own cover" is the most stressful.

I do see your point, but I think some context about where I work helps here. It's a very chilled company and all teams are very self-organising. In the case of me needing to find cover, I would just drop a message in our on-call slack channel and someone will almost always pick it up (and do the necessary stuff like adding an override in the opsgenie rotation). If nobody happens to see it (unlikely) then I would just let the alerts escalate to the next person who would be happy to pick it up because they know that people don't let alerts escalate without a good reason. Everyone cares about their colleagues so they want to help if they can (it's also quite a small company).

Are you using an in-house scheduler or is this a feature of a particular tool?

No this is an in-house tool. I would share the repo but for some reason it's private (not sure why, there's nothing confidential in it)

Got it, thanks. Well, if you ever decide to open it up I'd be keen to having a look at it. I have yet to see a good automated scheduler and none of the places I've been so far had an automated solution that worked fine when it comes to holidays, scheduled time off, etc. A lot of manual work was put into scheduling shifts, which I always found very disappointing.

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