How does your team handle 'on call' evening/weekend hours?

#meta #discuss

As Ben pointed out in his post, "I've been de facto on call 24 hours a day since starting dev.to but this weekend I'm going camping", we clearly don't have a fair schedule for handling late night or weekend emergencies, yet.

I know some teams rotate weekend duty and get a weekday off here or there, but I'd really like some real world recommendations or what to or not to do.

Latest comments (16)

Andrew Grothe • Sep 28 '17

I'm currently on a team that supports a critical government app responsible for people's pay cheques. We have a phone that the on call person carries and only get calls from the help desk when they get a call. We do two weeks on and have anywhere from 2 to 5 people on rotation depending on the current team size. There is extra pay for "standby" and also hourly payment for doing work outside of business hours. It works well and all the devs are onboard.

Kamal Mustafa • Sep 15 '17

We have just started our on-call shift for about 2 weeks ? Previously, I don't agree on having on-call shift, preferring "mutual responsibility" approach. But now I started to feel it's bad for everyone, as that mean everyone can't "disconnect" from work at all time. So We discussed how the on-call shift should look like - 2 days per shift, or one week shift etc. We're a team of 10 but only 5 being put on call for now. In the end we decided for 2 days shift as 1 week seem too long for 1 person to take on.

We have a python script that printing the on-call roster for the following week but plan to have one month schedule ahead, as that seem easier to plan your day when you know what day you'll be on-call for the month.

p/s: I'm currently on-call, that's why I came here 😁

Me, myself, and Irenne • Aug 31 '17

I mainly sleep during my shift mainly I don't have work lol

Anthony Delgado • Aug 22 '17

At one of my last companies we used to get an extra days pay in our pay checks every month and we would rotate being "on call" every weekend it would be someone else's turn. At my last company we used to substitute weekend work days for PTO so if you worked weekends for a few weeks straight you could save up days and get an extra vacation. One of our team members took like a month off with saved up PTO (Paid time off)

dude* • Aug 11 '17

There's no magic recipe I guess, the trick is to have a big team working on rotation. There have been times I used to support two technologies handling issues for both on the same time 😏

rhymes • Aug 11 '17

I don't have anything to add to the conversation, just wanted to point you in the direction of this publication which has an entire issue on "on call": increment.com/on-call/

Jonathan Boudreau • Aug 11 '17

We have no real system for this at my work. It's whoever is available, willing, and most capable that usually gets called.

Sam Johnson • Aug 11 '17

Same as many here. On call roster is 1 week shifts of being secondary followed by 1 week shift of primary followed by a week off. It is really easy to manage via PagerDuty. They have calendar integrations and an easy way to manage overrides for particular days. It is important to have levels of on call so that people know that in an emergency there are other people to rely on as well.

We all switch around weekends a lot when people have different events to go to. I think its best to allow flexibility but keep a solid schedule.

Also, pay people for the days they are on-call. These are extra hours that they have to work and they deserve compensation for it. It also makes it easier to switch out days since there is an incentive.

Sena Heydari • Aug 11 '17 • Edited

Here are a few recommendations that have worked well in environments I've worked in the past :

Big +1 on what @val_baca said below. Determine alternate weeks and definitely have an on-call calendar that everyone's dates and rotations are on.
Documentation of critical systems and troubleshooting steps to get things back to good working state are key. This has saved hours of troubleshooting and downtime across multiple teams I've been in. Equally beneficial is person who's out can relax a lot more knowing things are being handled in a somewhat organized fashion in case of emergency, and they won't come back to a worse fire than the original one.
List out the major holidays/travel times of the year that people usually want to be with friends and family, e.g. Christmas, New Year's, etc. Figure out who's going to cover each one. It's often the worst feeling when everyone on a team has unchangeable plans over a long weekend and someone gets stuck with being on-call at the last minute.
Track on-call coverage data and adjust accordingly. Equitable scheduling should ideally balance out all incidents, but if a team deploys heavily at the beginning of every month, and the same person is always on-call during that time, chances are they'll get a lot more calls during off-hours than everyone else in the rotation. Assess who's getting "on-call" burn-out, and swap around the responsibilities for a few weeks to help them recover.