Backend generalist. 10+ years coding professionally. Enjoys coming up with nuanced and thoughtful solutions to complex, thorny and ugly problems in old systems.
I've worked at a few places without an official on-call rotation (save for informal "who is available on thanksgiving?" spreadsheets). I felt like I was always on-call, which made it really hard to unplug. Would not do this again.
My current company has a small rotation of engineers who get paged in the middle of the night for critical system-level issues. The pages are infrequent (a few times/quarter) and actionable/important. The people on the rotation have enough general knowledge of our systems to deal with the pages. We have tooling wired into our PagerDuty config so non-engineers can page the right people if they need help or spot something wrong. It works really well. Getting paged is still a downer, but trustworthy monitoring/alerting and clear expectations about who deals with pages is a big help in terms of being able to unplug (I very rarely feel the temptation to check Slack on Saturday afternoon "just in case", for example).
I've heard of some places offering extra pay for people who opt-in to the on-call rotation. I like this idea (it's like paying literal interest to service tech debt), and it's something I'd ask for if I worked somewhere where I was paged multiple times per rotation.
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I've worked at a few places without an official on-call rotation (save for informal "who is available on thanksgiving?" spreadsheets). I felt like I was always on-call, which made it really hard to unplug. Would not do this again.
My current company has a small rotation of engineers who get paged in the middle of the night for critical system-level issues. The pages are infrequent (a few times/quarter) and actionable/important. The people on the rotation have enough general knowledge of our systems to deal with the pages. We have tooling wired into our PagerDuty config so non-engineers can page the right people if they need help or spot something wrong. It works really well. Getting paged is still a downer, but trustworthy monitoring/alerting and clear expectations about who deals with pages is a big help in terms of being able to unplug (I very rarely feel the temptation to check Slack on Saturday afternoon "just in case", for example).
I've heard of some places offering extra pay for people who opt-in to the on-call rotation. I like this idea (it's like paying literal interest to service tech debt), and it's something I'd ask for if I worked somewhere where I was paged multiple times per rotation.