[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)