The best way to manage on-call is to not have on-call. On-call means the organization is understaffed. Hiring new positions to handle off hours, will solve the problem. Good luck.
I’ve seen this comment or similar many times on HN, and I wonder if it’s a result of the kinds of companies people work for.
If you’re in a “boring” industry, it’s completely infeasible to hire a 24/7 dev team just to cover on-call. Doubly so if on-call requires physical access or security clearance.
If you’re at some multinational big tech firm, sure, I can see how it makes sense to geographically distribute the team so that there’s no “out of hours” support. For the rest of the industry it’s a non-starter.
Realistically, lots of parts of capitalism never sleep, and having outages at night still costs lots of money, astronomical amounts if there was no one there to fix it.
Hardly any of them anymore since the pandemic. Our local McDonald's used to be 24x7 now they close at 2200. Nobody will work later than that anymore, at least not for a wage that can be covered by the amount of sales at those hours.
If you’re in a “boring” industry, it’s completely infeasible to hire a 24/7 dev team just to cover on-call. Doubly so if on-call requires physical access or security clearance.
If you’re at some multinational big tech firm, sure, I can see how it makes sense to geographically distribute the team so that there’s no “out of hours” support. For the rest of the industry it’s a non-starter.