[64StarFox64]

I just joined a company that does formal but unpaid oncall, coming from a prior co that had implicit oncall. I'm very much in the "if you built it, you run it" camp. This said, I think:

- if oncall is a part of the gig, you compensate _somehow_ (demonstrably above market salaries, explicit extra pay, time in lieu, etc); oncall culture (or the lack thereof) should be explicitly mentioned in any hiring process and employment contracts

- the team should be striving for 8 or more engineers in the steady state; temporary vacancies should be temporary

- primary should be handling 80+% of pages in the steady state; if this is not the case on average across the team, you are not building enough resiliency into your oncall culture, or relevant tech debt should be high priority

- relatedly, kpis/incentives should be structured such that as call gets worse, progressively more immediate investments are made to address technical root causes (a la SRE error budget)

I'm tinkering with that last one my head. It's easy to say, hard to execute