[CodeMage]

I think @grecy was pretty clear, but FWIW, here's my interpretation: the system is either important enough to disturb employees after hours or it isn't. If it is, you need to define and implement a support protocol: on-call rotations, procedures, etc.

If it isn't important enough to organize support for it, then it isn't important enough and you should not expect anyone to justify being off work and off duty.

[happychappy]

Okay, I see.

I will talk to my team on Monday and ask their opinion.

For the record, I don't agree that life is as black and white as the first sentence. There are plenty of symptoms which "could" be serious issues, but after a phone call I know can be safely ignored.

[grecy]

I appreciate your reply - thanks.

I honestly would like to hear the thoughts of your team if you are happy to reply here please.

In all honesty - you're right, I'm not very flexible. Either you're paying me to be on call and I'll answer my phone at 3am on a Sunday, or you're not.

Let's flip it around so you see my point of view. Either I stick to the employment contract and ask you to pay me my salary this week, or for reasons completely outside your control, I expect you to pay me $salary+$X, because I said so. If you say no, I view you as inflexible.

See my point?

[happychappy]

I do see your point, yes. The contract is formal for a reason. I'm being far too fuzzy, my team probably don't know what they're supposed to do in the case of an emergency, so log in out of a mixture of curiosity and apprehensiveness.

Hmmm. Well, I always hated pager duty, especially as a frontend engineer. What the hell did I know about these silly Hadoop clusters that were thrown together so badly? Why wake me up just so I can wake up the lazy SOB who can't build software properly?

I'd prefer not to impose that on my team. Is there a middle ground?

[cookiecaper]

The middle ground is correctly configured alarms that follow team-specific escalation policies and wake up the right people.

FWIW, alarming systems aren't that flexible. The market sorely needs better solutions around monitoring and alarming. We use PagerDuty for this and it can be made to work with about 80% of our alarms, but it's a PITA. Also, on the topic of waking people up, the PagerDuty app conveniently includes several blaring, obnoxious alarms, but it frequently fails to receive push notifications, so it's not that rare for someone (or several someones) to sleep through the PDs. :|

I do understand what you're saying and I think most people actually are reasonably flexible as long as the occasion doesn't become common. But I wouldn't hold it against someone who's dangling from a mountain if they can't text back immediately (unless they're the on-call engineer that day).

[grecy]

> my team probably don't know what they're supposed to do in the case of an emergency, so log in out of a mixture of curiosity and apprehensiveness

Imagine you're at home with your wife celebrating your anniversary after a bottle of wine, or out celebrating your child's 6th birthday and you get a text from work that makes you apprehensive enough to stop what you're doing and log into work systems.

Please talk to your team so none of them has to ever go through this. In my experience as an employee, it's a really shitty feeling.

> I'd prefer not to impose that on my team. Is there a middle ground?

Inclusion in the on-call rotation can be optional. If a person on the team wants and extra $x per month to be on call for y days per month, they're on the rotation. If another person doesn't want that, they're not.

That was done at one of my previous employers, I think it worked great. Generally speaking the younger people without families opted in, and the older people with families opted out. I loved hiking/camping/getting out of town at every chance, so I always opted out :)

(Please don't think all of the above means I dislike your management or something. Reading your other comments, it sounds like you'd be awesome to work for)

[CodeMage]

I agree that it's not always possible to know how serious an issue is from a first glance at its symptoms, but my first sentence wasn't about issues, it was about systems.

Feel free to substitute the word "system" with "project" or "service" or whatever best fits your own terminology, but the gist is: a particular chunk of deployed software either deserves after-hour support or it doesn't. You either care whether it's misbehaving during "off" hours or you don't. If you do, you should care enough to organize proper support. That's all I was trying to say.

Of course, "you should" might be too strong a phrasing; what I mean is that I think that it would be better for everyone and that I would rather work at a place where things are that way than at a place where they are the way you described them.