Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

190 points20 commentsa year ago
sed_zeppelin

I just want to jump in as a minority voice here. In case anybody is reading the other comments and feeling... alienated.

I refuse to accept on-call duties, full stop. If a job posting expects it, I don't apply. If a hiring manager says they have it, I do not accept the offer. If management starts talking about maybe implementing it, I protest. If it becomes enacted, I resign.

There is absolutely no situation in which I will ever participate in another on-call shift. I've been there, I've done it, now that chapter of my life is closed. Find some younger kid, pay them better than you paid me for the miserable intrusion on their life. I'm done.

Just wanted to be the voice who says what, hopefully, some of the more seasoned and battle-scarred readers here are thinking.

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ljoshua

My team does Wednesday to Wednesday for many of the same reasons mentioned in the article, and it works great. We switch at 11am and hold a hand-off meeting at that time, and invite the whole team.

Hand-off meetings with the whole team work really well (in my opinion!) when you have a relatively small team--we have 9 FT teammates. Often someone else may have been delegated the page or bug that arose and can discuss how they handled it, or someone who wasn't involved may have insight for how to handle a situation better the next time. Since we're all going to be on rotation at least once during a quarter, it's great to know what happened in case a similar page pops up later.

Finally, we also fill out a running Doc before/during the meeting with links to the pages/bugs, along with short descriptions of how they were handled. This forms a great living memory of how to deal with incidents, and is also often the birthplace of new playbooks for handling new types of incidents.

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polack

We do Thursday to Thursday and then you get Friday off after completed on-call. Being on-call gives you no extra pay by itself, but if you get paged off hours and need to work you get paid 150 to 200% of your normal hourly wage depending on what time of day you need to work.

Best on-call I’ve had.

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