As a current SRE, and having worked in a small startup, this doesn't echo my experience at all. What the author describes is possible what we would call "on duty" work, the grunt/maintenance work that comes with big software systems. It's not fun, and most companies/teams have friction getting this sort of work done. It's also however not how my SRE role is defined by any stretch. Our on-call work is much more about support during exceptional, somewhat rare circumstances.
Yeah, I was similarly confused. My experience has been that on-call is a roster of who will keep their laptop with them on the weekend. Incidents involve little to no customer comms, because if anything more than a sentence once an hour is necessary then there's someone else on call to handle it.
Support work is a necessary nuisance, but it's also not what on-call is meant to be.
Sounds like normal support work not sure why that's affecting morale.
It's normal in any kind of system to also cover issues.
Yes, at some point you might want to have a customer support / customer success later to at least triage them, but that makes more sense as you get bigger not when you are small.
I actually like having discussions on support days with customer. Yes, sometimes they're more annoying but it's direct feedback of people trying to use your software.
My on call experience required that I had to be able to respond within 10 ten minutes of the call, with 24/7/365 coverage. But if I couldn't get the issue resolved remotely it meant that I'd have to be in the office lab to recreate and reproduce the problem. It effectively restricted my movements personal movements to stay within commute distance of my office, and that includes all my vacation time as well.
That was the better part of a year in my life, continuous. Of constantly considering that every decision, every meal, every movement, every action at all times, and weighing it against the risk of impacting my ability to respond to a customer call. Maintaining an extended period of alertness for a threat that very rarely materializes is frustrating in many ways that I'd like very much to forget.
I didn't burn out from it, but it was a major factor in my decision to resign from that company. Obviously people out there that can handle this lifestyle, but I couldn't. And frankly I'm quite content to never try again.
I've worked at places where I was the only person on-call (except during vacations - that's horseshit).
It was fine, but as an SRE/DevOps person I had the authority to override the developer backlogs to get issues fixed and enforce monitoring, architectural, and quality standards. Technical debt rarely built up and we could take one step back before taking two forwards. The product people hate me at first, but the result was usually a platform where problems only ever occurred during deployments (which I've been mostly lucky that I was at places we could do it during business hours) or external factors happened (cloud resource issues, etc).
At my current company, I can count on one hand how many times I've been paged out of business hours in the last 4 years (we recently re-did oncall because it was recognized that it was a risk that I'd become irreplaceable, which is the one point I tried to hammer on them for awhile).
The worst on-call experience I ever had was working at a managed services company. That was the hell of supporting customers that refused to properly allocate resources or invest in their tech stacks. Never again.
I don't understand why on-call is normal. It's a huge mental burden on employees, which is especially an important issue in modern times of widespread mental issues, just so that some shitty mobile app can be available 24/7/365. If your business is important enough to have on-call, then you should have dedicated employees covering night shifts and nothing else, effectively limiting it to someone's office hours, effectively removing on-call. I think that there should be laws against on-call.
It's similar to using Electron to develop a software: Create quickly, offload the inefficiencies to the users' computers, so the developer can be comfy, and the development can be cheap.
When you have on-call like this, you offload your expenses to your employee's life and mental health, and it's cheaper on the paper, for the short term.
Then your company sinks as people starts leave, and the managers ask "Why?".
> If your business is important enough to have on-call, then you should have dedicated employees covering night shifts and nothing else, effectively limiting it to someone's office hours, effectively removing on-call.
Easy to say when you envision it as someone's office hours and not your office hours. If my employer gave me a choice between a normal shift plus oncall or a night shift with no oncall, I'd pick the on-call in a heartbeat.
You should be paid extra for all that time and indeed there are countries with legal frameworks which require an employer to pay the employee if their personal life outside of working hours is in any way constrained. If you are a contractor, always put limits for this kind of extra services.
Yeah, I worked in a couple companies that had the same requirements.
It also meant having to wake up on command in case the phone beeped, being unable to drink in my free time, being limited in which activities I could go to.
It was hell.
I know people are gonna hit back with "you're doing it wrong", but in this case it's the company doing it wrong, but nobody on HN will go there and tell them.
The only profession where there is a legitimate case for the "cannot drink in free time" requirement is Emergency medicine physicians. And even among physicians, they are some of the highest paid specialities. For most other cases it is simply the company trying to extract as much juice as possible from the existing working staff.
That's absolutely insane. I've argued with a CEO about on-call burdens being too heavy before, and that was with a roster of three people who were only available 7am to 7pm.
What kind of slave driver expects literal 24/7/365 availability? Does that not breach labour laws where you work?
The on-call rotation had escalation, and instead of going to the manager it went to someone else in the team. Since there were only two backend engineers in my team, I was either always 1st or 2nd (clown emoji).
Unfortunately this is a huge hole in German labour law.
I quit there pretty fast, after a couple months. It was a tourism company, so Corona treated them very well.
The other company where this happened was a Content Marketing company that was wiped out by ChatGPT. I didn't do on-call there but the other team did.
> It effectively restricted my movements personal movements to stay within commute distance of my office, and that includes all my vacation time as well.
So were you the only one ever on call? That's rough. I've been in two man (every other week) rotations and that was annoying, but went to being solo on call for about a month. That was a shitty month, despite not having many calls. It's just the constant thought and consideration like you mention.
