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by lolinder 443 days ago
Shift work sucks more than on call for me. I like having a flexible schedule that I can work whenever I want, and I'll happily take the remote risk that I'll get paged during my one week per quarter on call rotation in order to guarantee that no one expects me to be on during set hours the rest of the year.

I think the problem isn't on call itself, it's that a lot of companies suck at on call. If your rotation is every 3 weeks and you get woken up in the night at least once per rotation, then yeah, that's awful. But the problem you have in that case is that stuff is always on fire and you don't have enough people on the rotation, not with on-call as a concept.
1 comments
hx8 443 days ago
I'd take a night-shift job over being on call ontop of a 9-5.

I think the real answer here is to have team members on multiple continents. Have some team members NA/EU/Asia then it's always reasonable hours for someone to deal with the production problem. High priority issues can be worked on around the clock without anyone working overtime.

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lolinder 443 days ago
That's still shift work. It's still the company assuming that I'll be available during N specific hours of the workday in order to fix issues.

Look at it this way:

If I work a job where I'm expected to be on 9-5, 46 weeks per year, 40 hours each week, that amounts to 1840 hours of scheduling my life around my employer.

If I work a job where I can schedule my work however I like and also have on call 1 week out of every quarter, the worst case scenario there is 672 hours of scheduling my life around my employer (and in practice the demands of on call in my current rotation are far less than that). The rest of my life I can schedule as I please, so long as I do my job.

I would rather take the option that minimizes the number of hours where my employer gets to tell me where to be.

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fsckboy 443 days ago
I know plenty of friends (mostly medical) who've had "on call" shifts on top of their 9 to 5, but in those cases it was pretty exceptional for them to actually receive a call, and the "interruptions" would be a small number of hours.
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