> Software engineers having "on call" schedules at all is crazy to me. You shouldn't be writing code at 3am to fix a bug after working all day just to turn around and work the next day as well.
Oncall is only crazy to anyone who also believes it's totally acceptable to have whole services down for hours throughout the night.
To those who understand what it takes to have anything available 24/7, you understand damn well that you need someone to jump on a laptop as soon as an alarm bell rings.
Well, that someone better be someone else than me, because I'm not going to do unpaid night shifts. If you want something running 24/7, it's surely important enough to warrant hiring someone else to take care of it while I'm asleep, no?
Keep your fancy valley salary (with the ridiculous rent prices attached), and I'll keep my European workers right's protection—including undisturbed sleep after my 8 hours workday.
Yeah, it's different in the EU. In the US, it's often expected from engineers to be on unpaid oncall—that is, these companies usually phrase being oncall as part of your ordinary duties, without additional compensation. And even if it's compensated, sometimes you cannot opt out of this without seriously harming your career.
Something ridiculous like that is luckily impossible in (most?) EU countries.
At one company, I was technically on call 24 hours a day 7 days a week for over ten years. Did I get called that often? No. Did I get called at the worst possible moments? Yes.
That's not a problem with the concept of being oncall. That's an entirely different problem that's not technical nor operational not industry-specific.
Isn’t the fact that you receive calls seldomly, but at the worst possible moment literally the core problem of being oncall?
And it’s certainly industry-specific. Some doctors have this, firefighters—and software engineers. Contrary to the first two, they usually don’t save lives, but revenue though.
There is a cost to having on-call. Whether it's in the extra hours you are paying your engineers or other technicians, or sleep deprivation, dwindling motivation and performance, the cost is always there.
In a business, cost is always balanced with the return on that investment.
So it trivially follows that on-call only makes sense where the return is bigger than the investment. If you are having your $100/h engineers become $20/h engineers during the day because of the on-call rotation, and you lose $200 of sales over night when things are down (even your customers are asleep) — you are actually investing that $80/h difference for 8 hours ($640) to recover $200, for a net loss of $440.
Yes, there are cases where it's fully acceptable to simply have your service down for the night. Eg. imagine a service that provides the amount of energy sun is providing for a location (to combine it with solar farm production): is it really that bad if that's down at 2am? Sure, it might be nice to get it back up before the sun is up, but this is just a trivial example where an uptime of ~70% (fluctuates) is perfectly acceptable.
> There is a cost to having on-call. Whether it's in the extra hours you are paying your engineers or other technicians, or sleep deprivation, dwindling motivation and performance, the cost is always there.
I don't understand your take. Every single time I had a job with an oncall rotation, that oncall was paid. I was paid a bonus for being oncall, I was paid a bonus if during oncalls a pager fired outside of office hours, I was paid a bonus if I was pulled into an incident response outside of my oncall rotation. There was always a cost, and we were paid for it. Being oncall represented loosely a pay bump of around 15%.
If that's not your case then I'm sorry but your problem is not the oncall rotation.
That should make my point more obvious: why would a business pay you 15% more if they are losing minor or no money or customers if services are down until someone comes back for their regular work day?
If what we’re talking about is a website/app/SaaS/etc, and if it needs to be up 24/7, then that almost certainly means that it’s being used globally, or at least across several timezones.
So, hire a team in another time zone.
This is a problem of management not prioritizing the health and wellness of their employees, simple as that.
It's absolutely acceptable to have your website go down for some reason overnight. Fix it in the morning.
Even if your app is critical infrastructure (it isn't, and 99% of you shaking your head and saying it is are objectively incorrect), you don't need a software engineer to fix it. You need an SRE. That's completely different.
Oncall is only crazy to anyone who also believes it's totally acceptable to have whole services down for hours throughout the night.
To those who understand what it takes to have anything available 24/7, you understand damn well that you need someone to jump on a laptop as soon as an alarm bell rings.