[dancc]

Someone wrote about Bending Spoons' history and playbook:

https://www.colinkeeley.com/blog/bending-spoons-operating-ma...

I enjoyed this part:

No On-Call Rotations: Bending Spoons aims to build systems so reliable that they eliminate the need for on-call rotations. This is unusual in the tech industry, where on-call duties are standard to promptly address system issues.

For most of their products, they have no on-call schemes at all. Engineers are encouraged to think through all corner cases to ensure robustness, knowing there is no fallback like an on-call team.

[hamdingers]

Seems reasonable if they're putting most of their acquisitions into maintenance mode. In my experience the vast majority of outages are caused by bad deploys of new code or configuration.

[everfrustrated]

I wonder if that's got lost in translation somewhere. I can understand not having on-call operations teams (an anti-pattern) but not having anyone on call at any time seems unlikely. Unless they mean to say its part of all devs job expectations and not a paid extra.

[veidr]

I don't want to imply Bending Spoons is this awesome, as I know nothing much about them (except that they named their company after a weird scam, lol), but there's a pretty reasonable principle that might apply here:

If our service goes down for any reason, uh... wait until Monday afternoon, then try again. (Sorry!)

Like, who would die if AOL was down for 36 hours?

[mikeyouse]

I think they’re actually named after the scene in the matrix where the little kid (and then Neo) can bend the spoon with their mind.

[veidr]

Oh! LOL that's admittedly cooler than https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uri_Geller

[NetOpWibby]

I've heard this name on the radio in GTA2 for years but I never looked up the name. Fascinating.

[RajT88]

Considering AOL's business model was to keep old folks paying for dialup, and once they moved off of dialup continue paying for access to the AOL portal, a good chunk of their user base may already be dead and still being billed.

[Barrin92]

>but not having anyone on call at any time seems unlikely.

Bending Spoons is Milan based and most of Europe has very strong right-to-disconnect laws. It's not really uncommon here to not have anyone on call unless you're some big multinational.

[luismedel]

All companies I've worked at had (paid) on-call set up. The right to disconnect isn't incompatible with business needs and the law contemplates it. Also, nurses and doctors do it too.

[everfrustrated]

Yeah that law is really about not taking advantage of low paid-by-the-hour employees vs high paid salaried.

But give people any excuse and they'll run with it.

In the UK custom has always been to require a standard opt-out to be signed as part of hiring process.

[prmoustache]

On calls are also the norm in Europe.

We get time and money compensation for that.

[Copenjin]

Is anyone surprised that you can build stuff that require no support for years? I do, know people that do. Thinking about robustness is the default path.