Ryan Novosielski

My fundamental issue with being on call is that I care more about my personal life & health than I do about whether my employer’s website is operational. I assume everyone does! So...why do we put up with on-call at all? Maybe there’s something to this labor solidarity thing

I live in the Presidio, in San Francisco, which is a former military base that now has thousands of people living on it, renting about 50 different types of former military housing.

The Presidio has a whole huge maintenance department who keep it all running. They mostly operate during normal business hours, but there’s an after hours line you can call for emergencies, which I have a few times. When it’s a real emergency, they send their on-call person over.

Once during one of these incidents (when disgusting water started spontaneously rising, and fast, from the drain of my kitchen sink a few Chtistmases ago...) I chatted with the on call person about how the system works.

For every on call shift they take, they get paid 2x for ALL the time, whether there are incidents or not, PLUS they get an extra vacation day. Most of them live on the Presidio, so they can chill at home unless an incident comes up that they need to go fix.

The guy fixing my sink was an electrician, but he knew enough about the plumbing to triage until a more permanent fix could be applied by the plumbers, once they were back to normal business after the holiday. It sounded a lot like how on-call could work in software, too.

There’s no reason we couldn’t make afterhours on-call something people WANT to do. It takes a combination of quality controls (so interrupts are infrequent) and incentives (so staff who can participate feel compensated, and staff who can’t participate aren’t penalized).