Comment by Plasmoid
Comment by Plasmoid 4 days ago
I wonder if engineers are going to start refusing to do on-call. "Sorry, it's going to take me an hour to get to the office because I'm not allowed to work remotely".
Comment by Plasmoid 4 days ago
I wonder if engineers are going to start refusing to do on-call. "Sorry, it's going to take me an hour to get to the office because I'm not allowed to work remotely".
I hear a fair amount of this sentiment floating around. Not so much "I won't do oncall" but more so a deflation of moral -- if you want clock punchers, we can be clock punchers.
Setting a SEV2 to "pending" does prevent you from getting re-paged during the weekend when you're at home (where work, as I understand it, does not get done).
I think there should be a automatic overtime law. Every minute beyond 40 hours should be automatically billed to the company.
Use the laptop spy software that companies have been conveniently using anyway to enforce this.
i don't agree with the mandate but at the very least, if they're going to do this they should absolutely exempt workers from returning to office during the periods they are on-call!
Do you work on software that gets sold to customers? Often, uptime guarantees are included in contracts. If your software breaks, somebody has to fix it.
> Why would you waste eng time on something as trivial as support?
Because eng is the only people who know how the software works if it breaks, who else can fix it?
I would also say that good support is not trivial (this is not eng specific, it's a company wide initiative) and can be a competitive differentiator
> Is this an American corporate thing?
It's a "Our company has sufficiently-complex software that we sell to customers that pay us enough money to justify calling in one or more programmers outside of regular business hours to help handle problems that one or more of those customers considers Very Serious that our (IME often very, very knowledgeable) support staff can't figure out." thing.
In my experience its more for critical time-sensitive systems that run in off-hours (i.e. if this job fails overnight it needs to get fixed before x time or we'll be bleeding massive amounts of money).
So even if there is tiered support, they'll want an SME on some aspect of the system on-call as a fallback for higher/highest level triage.
Oncall isn't user support. Amazon (and a lot of services) are supposed to work correctly even outside of office hours and someone needs to be able to fix things. That's one downside of software as a service.
Snark aside, that's not how oncall works at Amazon.
The oncall person has a laptop (and perhaps a pager), and they are expected to remote connect ASAP when needed. That was the norm well before Covid; doesn't make sense to wait for a commute before responding.
But then maybe after you do the first level of triage, if it's still ongoing, then you go in to the office.