this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2024
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Yeah. And when the outage is due to something external, it's not too stressful. As long as you don't have absolutely insane bosses, they'll understand that it's out of your control. So, you wait around for the external system to be fixed, then check that your stuff came back up fine, and go about your day.
I personally liked being on call when the on-call compensation was reasonable. Like, on-call for 2 12-hour shifts over the weekend? 2 8-hour days off. If you were good at maintaining your systems you had quiet on-call shifts most of the time, and you'd quickly earn lots of days off.
Yeah I'd be less worried about internal pressures (which should be minimal at a halfway decently run org) and more about the externals. I don't think you would actually end up dealing with anything, but I'd know those reliant huge corps are pissed.
Man, your on-call situation sounds rad! I was salaried and just traded off on-call shifts with my team members, no extra time off. Luckily though, our systems were pretty quiet so it hardly ever amounted to much.
I think you want people to want to be on call (or at least be willing to be on call). There's no way I'd ever take a job where I was on-call and not compensated for being on-call. On-call is work. Even if nothing happens during your shift, you have to be ready to respond. You can't get drunk or get high. You can't go for a hike. You can't take a flight. If you're going to be so limited in what you're allowed to do, you deserve to be compensated for your time.
But, since you're being compensated, it's also reasonable that you expect to have to respond to something. If your shifts are always completely quiet, either you or the devs aren't adding enough new features, or you're not supervising enough services. You should have an error budget, and be using that error budget. Plus, if you don't respond to pages often enough, you get rusty, so when there is an event you're not as ready to handle it.