Has anyone noticed any changes in their mental health after going #PagerDutyFree?
Posted by civicode@reddit | ExperiencedDevs | View on Reddit | 66 comments
Anconia436@reddit
Yes. On Call from my experience has been so horribly managed and prioritized, especially as it is mostly unpaid nowadays, that it is the core reason I left most roles and why others mostly left too. Which is ironic as replacing us (and we were decent engineers) was quite costly in itself, not to mention the retraining they had to do on newbies.
Dense_Age_1795@reddit
yep, I'm less stressed in general, and my girlfriend appreciates the decision.
potatolicious@reddit
I started my career at Amazon, where my on call rotation was 1 out of every 4 weeks. There was a 80-90% chance of a page each shift, mostly in the middle of the night since that’s when some shitty ETL job would fall over.
I completely revamped my career away from backend into mobile just so I can avoid being on call ever again. It was worth it.
darkforceturtle@reddit
I'm thinking of doing the same since my current job's on-call rotation is driving me mad. I also heard going front end has less possibility of on-call and stressful urgent issues. May I ask how did you find the transition to mobile and what's the job market? I'm assuming you started with less YoE since mobile is different from backend? I read that mobile can have less job opportunities than backend or frontend.
potatolicious@reddit
I'm happy to advise, but not sure how useful I can be given how long ago this was. I made the switch from backend to mobile in 2011 (damn, it's been a while).
Back then the iOS app market was booming, where companies were successful just selling apps on the App Store. Every web-based company was also looking to have apps made, so the market for freelance app devs was very hot.
The economics of app development have radically shifted since then. Nowadays most companies have no need for an app, and know it, so some of that frothiness has disappeared. There's robust need still for app devs but the players are generally larger, and tend towards products where the app isn't the whole product itself (for example Airbnb, Uber, where the app is just a means to an end).
Anecdotally true. Every company basically ~always needs backend devs, whereas mobile openings are less frequent. That said, mobile roles are pretty specialized and if you have the right experience you can be extremely desired as a specialist vs. a generalist web person.
darkforceturtle@reddit
Thanks a lot for the feedback. I guess it's very difficult to break into mobile now since the market is tough and there's not much demand for someone just starting. I know React so I could transition to React Native, but still, I have no mobile experience. And totally agree, I've worked in some companies where they would make the website reaponsive instead of having to hire a mobile dev. I wish I had made the switch long ago, but I didn't know on-call was so common for web developers. Perhaps I should look into moving to frontend.
I wish you all the best.
shto@reddit
Curious: why wasn’t like the top priority in the team fixing that job if it would constantly wake up people in the middle of the night?
potatolicious@reddit
Management wanted new features and didn’t want to put time to bug fixes and chasing failures. Was a theme at Amazon overall during my time there. Rank and file engineers had little control over the roadmap, though we tried.
abraham_linklater@reddit
The guy setting the priority isn't getting woken up
freethenipple23@reddit
My mantra is to make it his problem
I will redirect calls to that person until it is fixed
FoxRadiant814@reddit
I’ve never been on call but I’ve set up notifications to my phone. If it’s not Sev0 do it next time you’re at work. Don’t be the on call guy for the whole system, just YOUR system. And if your system is Sev0 ing so frequently you get PTSD, maybe rewrite it to actually be reliable, idk.
AnimaLepton@reddit
This is why we have India teams, to do the on call for us.
My experiences with on call were
One large private company where you were on call for two weeks/weekends out of the year. And yeah, of my few shifts, a few didn't have me get called. I was eventually "promoted" to a position that had one overnight shift per month max for planned maintenance windows/upgrades, which could also run long. Not really on call, just annoying.
One series A company where initially everyone was nominally on call for stuff that broke related to their expertise. By the time we raised series B, we'd transitioned to some employees/contractors in India who would be the primary point of contact to handle on call incidents or requests from our India-based operations team. They were actually very solid and solved like 90%+ of on-call type incidents before any US-based engineers woke up.
One later series company with on call one week per month. But four people would be "on call" together from different time zones. So weekday issues went to the engineers that were actually working those hours normally, and e.g. issues during the US weekend night time went to EMEA/APAC folks first. They also had really solid defined limits about what on call should do vs what would be left for functional area owners or specialists to address once back online for their normal shift.
PragmaticBoredom@reddit
If everything else is kept the same (compensation, etc.) and the only change is that on-call hours go away, obviously people are going to feel better.
For me personally, one of the happiest times in my career was a time when I was part of the on-call rotation. The key was that the team was great, the systems were architected well, spurious pages in the middle of the night were rare, and being on-call almost never meant spending hours awake every night.
On the other hand, if you're at a company where being on-call means you are a firefighter who will be awake all night for a week straight slapping band-aids on a failing system, then of course it's going to be terrible.
Darkmayday@reddit
Know what's better than rare middle of the night calls? None
Hei2@reddit
Our company gives extra PTO for on call shifts. That's pretty good compensation in my eyes.
Darkmayday@reddit
PTO doesn't make up for the nights. Studies have shown interrupting sleep is one of the worst things to your health.
cahphoenix@reddit
Depends on your sleep schedule and if you want the extra money.
I'm sure you don't do everything you see in studies.
Darkmayday@reddit
Make up pto isnt extra money
cahphoenix@reddit
I misread part of his comment. You are correct.
However, my point still stands.
For instance, I stay up late regardless, and I hate waking up early for work. If I can get PTO for being up anyway, I'll gladly take it.
Also, many companies DO compensate for PTO over a certain amount or when you leave. So PTO, in many cases, can be considered extra compensation.
freethenipple23@reddit
I have never worked at a company that does extra compensation for on-call rotations.
Trying to get that implemented is so insanely difficult too
BassFishingChamp@reddit
We do the same for Holidays and weekends. No overnight calls either its a solid deal. I just got this pushed through for our entire dev team. Very proud
morosis1982@reddit
We get an extra few hundo a week for on call, my team answered about 3 or 4 every 6 months.
I'll take it. I don't think I had any that were more than about 90min to solve.
jeremiahishere@reddit
So are you at a giant company that has a 14 step deploy process to eliminate risk or do you not have any users?
Darkmayday@reddit
Offshore teams to cover. And impacted users doesnt mean P1. Let's be honest 95% of people work on things that arent actually that important to require 24/7 support. Even if you work somewhere truly important such as say AWS it still entirely depends on what your team does specifically.
Stealth528@reddit
Exactly, unless critical functionality is broken it's not that important of an issue and it can wait until morning
jeremiahishere@reddit
That is a lot of words to say giant company
Darkmayday@reddit
No I was trying to say our jobs dont matter ; )
Stealth528@reddit
Don't deploy near the end of the workday, if you deploy in the morning and an issue hasn't popped up by the end of the day it's extremely unlikely something so critical happens someone needs to be paged. Pages are only for "holy shit this critical part of the application/the application itself is not working" not some random bug
MediocreDot3@reddit
You know what's even better? Lots of fucking money so I don't have to worry about work at all by 46-48 y/o.
Darkmayday@reddit
You can fire without on call. Im on the same track as you.
And if your company only gives make up PTO for oncall you aren't making more anyway
civicode@reddit (OP)
Agree 100%. The adrenaline is fun but wholly dependent on the environment and being supported.
BillyBobJangles@reddit
I almost miss when things were a lot more cowboy, and got to do things like ad hoc SQL queries in production to fix data issues.
The adrenaline rush of finding out if I saved us or fucked us with a single click was intoxicating. Knowing the fucked scenario means your company getting blasted on all the news channels for weeks and more money than you'd make in a hundred lifetimes... Gahh that's some intoxicating adrenaline.
ventilazer@reddit
It would be nice, if we could ping the developer responsible for the code block that failed Sunday at 3am. My code does not really break often, I write tests for it and it just runs.
lalatr0n@reddit
I was okay with getting notifications, but the first time it called me on my phone at 3AM and I heard that robot voice, I thought SkyNet was taking over.
The very next day I started refactoring the services to perform better.
burnbabyburn694200@reddit
Oh yes. At 5pm on the dot all notifications get turned off. By the time I’m out of the gym around 6:30-7 I feel pretty good.
By comparison, when I had that shit on my phone I would have constant anxiety around “fuck am I about to get an email at 8pm on a Tuesday?” and I’m here to tell you after 3 years straight of that it will absolutely destroy your mental health.
x2network@reddit
Curious. Why did you choose the gym instead of drugs and alcohol?
restricted_keys@reddit
On call almost ruined my marriage. I just couldnt get out of work mode and focus or appreciate my families needs during my rotation. It got to a point where I would get crippling anxiety even before my week started. This was my single biggest motivation to get promoted and have fewer on call duties.
It’s a lot peaceful now and gave me a new perspective to life. Working tirelessly to keep our systems stable and alarms less noisy.
Herrowgayboi@reddit
Not a datapoint you're looking for, but I went from a Tier 0 team to Tier 1 team, where I would easily get 40+ pages in 1 week on the Tier 0 team and maybe 2 per week on the Tier 1 team.
Even then, my mental health has gone through the roof. Couldn't imagine not having on-call anymore.
xabrol@reddit
I get paid overtime at $90-$100 an hour so I never had anxiety about pager duty.
I get excited when that goes off cuz im about to log 6 hours of ot digging through logs and enail chains to eventually run a script or push a button.
pyjl12@reddit
I’ve unfortunately never had roles that compensated for being on-call, how do folks negotiate this aspect of the role?
But I’m assuming that this is more of a thing that’s dependent on the company?
xabrol@reddit
I didn't negotiate For it at all.
The consulting company I work for pays overtime for every hour over 40 on salary. Its not straight 1.5x, its 110% to 120%.
If I already work my 8-hour work day and then I have to be on call and end up working for 3 hours in the middle of the night. Then I got 3 hours of overtime.
It doesn't compensate me just because I'm on call. It compensates me when I work.
If I want to go out I just toss my laptop in the trunk.
Successful_Creme1823@reddit
If you have the ability to fix whatever is causing the alerts permanently then I can deal.
If it’s some system I don’t have control of fuck that.
editor_of_the_beast@reddit
It’s not for everyone I guess. But it doesn’t affect my mental health. I think the contrary is true. Ignoring issues leads to more issues, and that’s what affects my mental health.
mhaynesjr@reddit
I spent years as the sole developer for a custom ERP for an e-commerce and having slack on my phone was how anyone would contact me. It was always 6 am on a Saturday or some dumb day/hour or automated alerts I set up that would constantly fire. Also it was always the worst when I left home to actually live life.
When I left, I had PTSD for so long and still kind of do. I still can't turn on the sounds on my phone and any vibrations I get from normal texts still have an effect on me.
black_lion_6@reddit
I don't mean to diminish your experience, I'm sure it was hard, but getting PTSD from Slack notifications is funny as fuck
diablo1128@reddit
I've never had a job in my 15 YOE that required on call. Benefits of working on safety critical medical devices which is more imbedded work I guess. There are whole field service teams that manage devices in the field.
I do sometimes wonder if what you hear about on-call forces SWEs do write better code would really happen. Then again SWEs I've worked with are fine with running automated tests multiple times until they see a pass, because the failure is just due to some test setup timing issue and not the actual code. So maybe on-call wouldn't help these SWEs be better, lol.
pixelrevision@reddit
I’ve never seen it really help much, people usually just complain a bunch instead. I’ve also had to deal with argumentative contractors that were not part of the on call rotation but were really against tests because they are “stupid” and “a waste of time”.
Hungry-Basketball@reddit
I’m currently in a job with pager duty. 7-8 work weeks during the year and then 3-4 weekends a year. Weekdays are 8-5 and weekends are Friday from 8 pm to Sunday to 8 pm.
I am about to hit year 2 in this position, and am positioning myself to jump but am nervous in this market. Don’t want to quit without a job lined up, but pager has increasingly gotten worse since our team continuously has added new teams under our support since I joined.
The position I had before this had no pager and would love to one day be back there.
AbbreviationsFar4wh@reddit
Lol not entirely free but it definitely improves when there aren’t calls.
Was killing me for a bit when we had some stability issues
joelypolly@reddit
Depends on how stable the platform and the SOPs are around unit/integration tests. At my previous job the team got paged maybe once or twice a quarter outside of business hours. It was also great since everyone was on the rotation including managers so everyone was motivated to write enough tests and ensure the CI/CD pipeline was working correctly.
metalisticpain@reddit
Yeah, it needs to be geared up incentivise the right motivations. I've implemented you build it, you run it, on call at my current job. I don't think a lot of the engineers like it. But at the end of that day, if you wrote good software, you will be paid a small amount for the inconvenience of keeping a laptop nearby. If you wrote bad software, yeah you're going to have a bad time 😅 but we'll help you fix it.
kellogs_aran@reddit
Yes. So much so that I would never work anywhere where that was the norm again.
libre_office_warlock@reddit
Not having an on-call situation is a strict boundary I now place with any workplace.
sevvers@reddit
Never been on call before but have worked in a startup environment where the founder would call to ask questions about the tech or pitch new feature ideas. Yeah, mental health definitely improved after I left.
Swordlash@reddit
What boggles my mind is the amount of companies that don’t think of paying for simply being on call (even if nothing happens). I’ve only been at one company (big English bank) that paid overtime rate (2x) for oncall weekend duties. Other companies seem to not see the amount of responsibility and mental burden being on call is.
I’m a consultant and one of the clients has a requirement for 24h oncall coverage. I have all sounds turned off at night. If nobody pays me to answer phones outside of business hours, I don’t care.
Roqjndndj3761@reddit
I will never take a job with pager duty again (unless it’s my own lifestyle business).
csanon212@reddit
At my previous company I was on call both regular and escalation on a major service for 1.5 years collectively. I became terrified of the default iPhone ringtone because that was my PagerDuty phone sound.
I used to stress eat.
Since changing jobs, and not having PagerDuty, I have kept a healthy weight and maintained a much higher level of happiness.
darkforceturtle@reddit
I'd never want to take another on-call job, but can't seem to find anything without it. I took this job 2 months ago due to the bad market because I thought it's good and the people were nice in the interview and nobody ever mentioned having on-call not in the job ad, interview, or my contract. Upon joining, I was told there's 24/7 on-call week every 6 weeks and it uncompensated. On top of that, this week is super intense and high pressure solving bugs and urgent customer issues all over the huge system that I never worked on. The rotation is messing up my mind and driving me crazy and my health keep deteriorating and I'm hating this field more everyday. Hell I can't even leave my apartment during this week because if something breaks I have to be there to help. I've been job hunting since I joined them but can't find anything.
darkforceturtle@reddit
I'd like to find out. It's hell having an on-call job and not being compensated on top of all that. I took this job 2 months ago due to the bad market because I thought it's good and the people were nice in the interview and nobody ever mentioned having on-call not in the job ad, interview, or my contract. Upon joining, I was told there's 24/7 on-call week every 6 weeks and it uncompensated. On top of that, this week is super intense and high pressure solving bugs and urgent customer issues all over the huge system that I never worked on. The rotation is messing up my mind and driving me crazy and my health keep deteriorating and I'm hating this field more everyday. I've been job hunting since I joined them but can't find anything good without on-call. I'd never want to have such a job ever again.
JDeagle5@reddit
I just don't accept offers with on-call. Recently our company tried to force it, but luckily the labour inspection solved the issue.
jnordwick@reddit
The fear of mine going off in a public space is always a big problem I'll be sitting there in a theater in a shopping center getting groceries and boom it would go off.
Full-Cow-7851@reddit
I will never again in my life take a job that has any on call rotation. Countless aspects of my life improved after quitting an on-call job at a huge tech company and taking a public sector job. I felt my body healing in the first month.
Adept_Carpet@reddit
On call is a nonstarter for me, at least for any salary I'm likely to be offered. There are enough businesses out there that don't require it.
spectralTopology@reddit
I used to get a facial tic when I'd hear the OG Blackberry page noise, pretty sure I'd get the same if I saw the pagerduty phone number pop up in my notifications. Fuck false positives I say.
anor_wondo@reddit
I remember in my last job, slack alert notification measurable spiked my heart rate and I eventually changed the notification sound
Informal-Dot804@reddit
Our team was structured different. There wasn’t an on call rotation. We had a separate team to monitor prod and they had some quick fixes in place (we’d send them feature flags, log messages and common errors and what they mean, etc) and if they couldn’t fix it they’d turn off the feature flag and log a ticket and you come online and check it. You were responsible for your code. The worst case was if it was a p1 (we’re bleeding money on relatively stable code that shouldn’t have broken or have a crowd strike-esque situation) they’d call in leads of whichever component was breaking. You’d swap in/out of the debugging call until we had a plan of action.
Anyway my point being, can anyone describe to me how on call works ? Do you actually try to debug unknown code and get new build tags ? Is that reasonable to expect everyone on the team to be able to do (assuming it’s not a component you own or are familiar with) ? Also are you still taking on sprint tasks ?