| I think you're being pretty disingenuous here. It is very unusual for anything to come up overnight and being paged is the last resort. If there was a sleepless night, we'd make sure you weren't oncall anymore that week. Oncall is about being available to be called within a certain amount of time, not being awake to keep an eye on things. Software keeps an eye on things. Nobody thinks a 24 hour oncall rotation is optimal, which is why companies distribute themselves throughout the world and simply have people at work somewhere 24 hours a day. But even at companies like Google, it's not always possible. You have to balance working on a small team and moving quickly versus having triple dev-team redundancy. Some other workarounds are: 1) Hire someone to be awake during off hours. They won't be around with the rest of the team, so probably won't have the same understanding of the service that they are responsible for supporting. Personally, I've never seen this work well -- both teams see each other as "out of sight, out of mind" and don't really help each other. 2) Ignore all issues between 5PM and 9AM. This is quite possible to do, and might be the right thing for certain companies. 3) Hope nothing bad happens, and when something bad does happen, call everyone on the team frantically hoping someone will be awake and answer your call. Like I said, I'm happy with the balance I have at work. I think it gives our customers the confidence they need to trust us, while giving engineers a decent work-life balance. I'm just some random engineer; I didn't start this company or force this upon others. I chose it for myself. I shared my experience because I think it's relatively unique (with the OP's experience of mandatory uncompensated work the norm), and I like it. |
This does not jive with my experience. Most companies aren't Google as you've described it, and in most cases the person on pager duty is the first human examining the incident.
> If there was a sleepless night
How about if they get woken up each night for an alarm that turns out to not be a big deal? That is the typical on-call experience, getting woken up for 15-30 minutes each night, cortisol from 0 to 100 in the 15 seconds it takes to get into Work Mode.
I guess that doesn't qualify as "sleepless" but between it and the general stress of not being able to turn the phone on silent, I'd call it "shit sleep." Nobody should be subject to it. How can you expect somebody to produce decent software in this condition?