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Comment by rufus_foreman | Hacker News Reader

>> You expect to not be responsible for what happens to the software you put into production?

I'm responsible for the software I put into production from 9 AM to 5 PM for about 200 days a year. At 3 AM, I am responsible for taking care of myself by getting a good night's sleep.

If you need 24 hour coverage, taking into account vacations and weekends, you need 5 or 6 people.

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"you need 5-6 people" is moving the goalposts. The root comment said nothing about minimum team size.

If the company has enough people in the team, someone just works the night shifts or on scheduled weekends. No one needs to be on-call because there would be someone taking care of it already.

Is the argument here that every software team should have engineers whose normal working hours have 24/7/365 coverage?

If you expect your team to provide 24/7/365 assurance, then it's hard to see how that isn't a perfectly reasonable idea. The only counter to it is that keeping people on call shifts financial cost off the business in the form of psychological cost to its employees. Not very convincing.

Would you take the night shift? Everyone I've seen promote this idea seems to expect that they'll be the lucky ones who get to keep a normal schedule. If you have a service that needs 24/7 uptime, and you transition from an oncall model to a shift model, at least 2 out of every 3 engineers on the team are going to have to change shifts or quit. If the entire industry shifts, high-availability software would simply join the ranks of fields like nursing or manufacturing where many people have no realistic option to work normal hours.

I'm the one who wants to do the night shifts. I miss the time when I worked with a 13-hour time difference due to time zones. But now I don't have the option of working at night, everyone has to be at work during 'business hours', and yet the company I now work for has an on-call policy, and they only pay a tiny bonus to people who join the initiative.

The sane way to solve that problem is to hire people in different time zones to get coverage. Some still need to do weekends but even those are not the same in every country (e.g. Israel).

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