[jsmthrowaway]

> people are wising up to the perils of being on call

I did too late.

It started with being asked to sleep in the guest bedroom while on shift and only got worse from there. Take it from me: it takes active investment to keep a family healthy while on call, especially when you're on call at a shaky startup with several pages per day that require extensive remediation.

I'm not stupid and I know on call was not the reason in itself, but it was a significant catalyst and debit upon my time and mental health -- not sleeping adds up. Be aware of it lest you end up like me, finally off call with an empty home to show for it.

[crpatino]

It is not as bad if you can rely on a strong team (3.5 years there, no significant consequences in personal life).

Some things that help:

1. Everybody is in the roll, not just the new guy(s).

2. The team is big enough for everyone to have a reasonable ratio of on-call vs off-call days. Merging two or more small teams into one single on-call roll of death does not count; people who is not knowledgeable on the problem at hand (e.g. everyone, eventually) will just fuck up and end up calling someone from the correct team anyways (after the problem has grown worse and the customer is angrier).

3. Team is encouraged to trade days or cover for each other if needed.

4. On-call guy has vetoe power over deployments. If you want to push something urgent at the end of the day, you better make yourself available to the guy that can vetoe your deployment.

5. Management understands that developer's productivity will slow down while on-call, and plan accordingly.

[hermitdev]

Yeah, I worked at a hedge fund for nearly a decade. I got called back to the office from vacation after driving across the country for a development - not production - issue. I started getting 2-4 am calls for outages in dev by our offshore support who were too lazy and/or incompetent to read a log file and take action. Glad I don't work there anymore.