[ponector]

Is it a US thing to push updates right before holidays and force people to be on call?

European companies I've been working on are planing releases till the end of November, first week of December max. All project plans are baked like there is one week in December.

While US company tried to force every contractors to work everyday and some weekends too. Are you Indian? You don't celebrate Christmas, you'll be on call. Are you Eastern Slavic? You celebrate Orthodox Christmas in January. You'll be on call.

[JoshTriplett]

Not all breakage happens because of new updates. Sometimes the servers go down, sometimes a bug that already existed gets triggered by something, sometimes there's extra volume over the holidays and the load is too much. Full agreement that you shouldn't push new code in late December, but that won't stop the need for some folks to be on call.

[hatthew]

We discourage changes starting early/mid november and completely freeze deploys a week before thanksgiving and christmas, but there's still so much that can go wrong. The other commenter summarized it well, but in addition there's also systems that require continuous automatic updates as part of their functionality, and sometimes those automatic updates can start to go haywire. For some systems, the holidays are the most important part of the year, and it's extra crucial for people to be monitoring and ready to respond at a moment's notice.

[erik_seaberg]

There are also systems that aren’t entirely stable due to resource leaks, and when you stop deploying you might find you need to restart them occasionally.

[crossroadsguy]

> Is it a US thing to push updates right before holidays and force people to be on call?

Yes. And usually they get it done via their off-shore employees in third world countries like India working during their night time.

> Are you Indian? You don't celebrate Christmas, you'll be on call.

Not celebrating Christmas isn't a point. The point usually is - you will be without a job probably if you are not agreeing to be on-call 24x7.

[ciceryadam]

SRE teams are Oncall 24/7/365