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Comment by dancc | Hacker News Reader

Someone wrote about Bending Spoons' history and playbook:

https://www.colinkeeley.com/blog/bending-spoons-operating-ma...

I enjoyed this part:

No On-Call Rotations: Bending Spoons aims to build systems so reliable that they eliminate the need for on-call rotations. This is unusual in the tech industry, where on-call duties are standard to promptly address system issues.

For most of their products, they have no on-call schemes at all. Engineers are encouraged to think through all corner cases to ensure robustness, knowing there is no fallback like an on-call team.

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Seems reasonable if they're putting most of their acquisitions into maintenance mode. In my experience the vast majority of outages are caused by bad deploys of new code or configuration.

I wonder if that's got lost in translation somewhere. I can understand not having on-call operations teams (an anti-pattern) but not having anyone on call at any time seems unlikely. Unless they mean to say its part of all devs job expectations and not a paid extra.

I don't want to imply Bending Spoons is this awesome, as I know nothing much about them (except that they named their company after a weird scam, lol), but there's a pretty reasonable principle that might apply here:

If our service goes down for any reason, uh... wait until Monday afternoon, then try again. (Sorry!)

Like, who would die if AOL was down for 36 hours?

I think they’re actually named after the scene in the matrix where the little kid (and then Neo) can bend the spoon with their mind.

Oh! LOL that's admittedly cooler than https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uri_Geller

I've heard this name on the radio in GTA2 for years but I never looked up the name. Fascinating.

Considering AOL's business model was to keep old folks paying for dialup, and once they moved off of dialup continue paying for access to the AOL portal, a good chunk of their user base may already be dead and still being billed.

>but not having anyone on call at any time seems unlikely.

Bending Spoons is Milan based and most of Europe has very strong right-to-disconnect laws. It's not really uncommon here to not have anyone on call unless you're some big multinational.

All companies I've worked at had (paid) on-call set up. The right to disconnect isn't incompatible with business needs and the law contemplates it. Also, nurses and doctors do it too.

Yeah that law is really about not taking advantage of low paid-by-the-hour employees vs high paid salaried.

But give people any excuse and they'll run with it.

In the UK custom has always been to require a standard opt-out to be signed as part of hiring process.

On calls are also the norm in Europe.

We get time and money compensation for that.

Is anyone surprised that you can build stuff that require no support for years? I do, know people that do. Thinking about robustness is the default path.

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