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by Equiet 1464 days ago
It's surprising how seemingly difficult it is to build a good on-call scheduling system. Everything I tried so far (not naming the companies here) felt like the UX was the last thing on the developers' minds. Which is tolerable during business hours but really annoying at 2am.

Is there some hidden complexity or is it just a consequence of engineers building a product for other engineers? Also, any tips what worked for you?

1 comments

Have had lots of bad experiences with that from Pagerduty at least. Want to generate a schedule far in advance, so people know when they will be oncall and can plan/switch.

Of course, in a few months we may have some new people having joined, some quit, or other circumstances. A single misclick when fixing that can invalidate the whole schedule and generate another. Infuriating.

Or the UI itself, might have become better tha last two years, but having to click "next week" tens of times to see when I was scheduled (since I wasnt just interested in my next scheduled time but all of them) were annoying.