Comment by brudgers
On-call issues are staffing issues not tools issues.
Inadequate staff is the only reason on-call exists. Sure, people might be mostly sitting around all night being paid and not being terribly busy.
But if a company needs someone at night, they need someone at night. Companies getting away with not paying for that is why oncall sucks.
In other words oncall sucks because companies don’t pay for solving the problems that require it. There’s no self correcting feedback.
A tool can’t fix that and oncall is not inevitable. Good luck.
I assume it's part of the pay. You can't be a firefighter or a cop and then complain that there's night shifts. I've had nearly 4 years of it at a payment gateway and IIRC only one time was there something that had to be solved that night. When it happened, it was sort of my fault anyway; a good deal of the problems are (should be?) within the control of the people being on-call. And I think companies like payment gateways and cloud services which need people active at all times are also far more tolerant of things like spending a week reviewing a PR and such, so the frequency of downtime is lower even if the impact is much higher.
Though I'd agree it's a staffing issue. 5 people in a cycle is fine. If you had a concert or something that week, just swap places with a colleague. When we reduced it to 2 people, it was not cool to spend half your time on-call.
There's also policies like don't release on Fridays, don't release on a vacation week. If there's a tool for it, it would be flagging these behaviors. Unfortunately, we can't really control when partners go down.