[throwaway765123]

Throwaway so I can talk honestly.

I used to work on call in non-software, as a blood analyzer Field Service Engineer for medtech companies, like Siemens, Roche, Beckman-Coulter, Bio-Rad, etc. I spent 5 years doing this.

In that industry and job it's standard to work on call rotations that last for 7 days through the weekend and repeat every 3-5 weeks depending on team size. Because the job is hands-on and at customer sites, the minimum response time is usually a bit more than 15 minutes.

If anyone is considering accepting an on-call rotation, don't. It takes over your life. At first you may think it's fun to swoop in and be the hero fixit person, or maybe you at least tolerate it because of high base pay or something. Eventually you grow to hate the sound that accompanies the callout text or email. By the end, it triggered a visceral physical negative reaction I later learned was a minor anxiety attack.

The thing managers seeking to add on-call don't understand (those who haven't done it themselves), is that when you're on call you can't do anything. Not only can you not drink (minor annoyance), you can't even leave the house for normal stuff like a movie (medium), or attend events like a kids graduation or recital (major).

And before you say "just swap rotations around on your team," I worked with about 10-15 guys and you'd be surprised how hard it is to swap. Everyone makes plans for things all the time without realizing it would interfere with on-call, like going to the gym. At the start of the year when the on-call rotations would be released to us, there was a mad rush to submit vacation requests to get it locked in before illness or other things required swapping on-call around, much less having to take field requests from colleagues that you may (will) have to rely on when you in turn need a swap, so you can't just ignore every request.

This manager and CTO are hilariously unprepared and uninformed, bordering on pure dreaming. A 15 minute max response time is criminally unrealistic, you can't even go to the grocery store. And once a week seems low on paper until you realize that depending on team size, you can easily wind up being forced to give up a quarter of your weekends for the year (as I had to).

I haven't worked on-call for software, so maybe it's different, but I doubt it's really too different.

After 5 years of all that lost time, the amount I'd have to be paid to go back on-call is so astronomically high no company would ever pay it. Actually, now that I have a kid, there's probably no amount I could be paid if it means missing time with them.

[wink]

It depends though. I totally see your point and when I was working in a company where we spread the oncall between all people it was a) usually no problem to swap a few hours (we did full weeks, so if you had one thing for 4h one night, usually someone would cover) and b) our response times weren't quite SO harsh - so we did some things, as long as you had cell coverage and a laptop nearby. Of course the cinema was out, or being on the road for hours, but going for groceries was no problem.

I still hated it and don't want to do it anymore because we had so many factors out of our control that made "false" alarms where the only thing to do was check if it was really a problem and then open a ticket upstream at a vendor...

[Silhouette]

It seems like OP and their CTO would like to have reliable 24/7 operations but do not have the skill to do it by designing systems that won't fail catastrophically out of hours or the budget to do it by hiring dedicated staff to be available at all times to fix problems. So instead they are trying to abuse their existing staff.

The correct response to this IMHO is for the existing staff to collectively tell management where to go. In life you can't always get what you want if you don't have the money or make the effort it requires.