Sometimes a work related social media post will trigger a bunch of thoughts. I want to make sure that I navigate this topic thoughtfully and people understand that I get it.. there are two sides to this issue. Some companies have no other choice than to install a strict set of rules around response time for customer issues. While the post below may be on the snarky side, it does convey a good point.

Not THE reason, but one of the reasons I retired a little early from my role as a Site Reliability Engineer was because of a BRUTAL on-call schedule. Not everyone at my company viewed it the same way I did so I can only speak for myself, but being on a short leash doesn’t set well with my physical, mental or emotional well-being. I HATED PagerDuty and everything about being on-call. The job was otherwise fine. On-call, not so much.

It’s totally my fault for signing on with a company that I knew might eventually lead me to on-call responsibility. It was a choice, and a bad one. A bad one because the pluses didn’t outweigh the minuses. A bad one because my anxiety was off the charts. I’m talking having to take new meds off the charts.

In my role as an SRE I probably earned $10-$20k more than I may have in some other engineering role. For that $10-$20k I gave up my freedom to move about the cabin. The expectation was 5 minutes until hands on keyboard from being paged. I couldn’t take a walk around the block, go to the grocery store or be more than 5 minutes away from my laptop at any point for two weeks. That’s because we got assigned a week of secondary on-call where we acted as a backup to the primary on-call followed by a week of primary on-call. Did we get a ton of calls? Nope. Several in a week’s time but it wasn’t constant. It didn’t matter. I was still on a short leash and tied to my laptop. If life were to offer me one mulligan I would definitely use it to find a role that didn’t include on-call.

But Bill, you’re not a company guy then. You’re a lousy teammate!

Bullshit. At a different company I worked several off hours release deployments that kept me up until 2am and I didn’t mind it one bit. Why? Because I could plan it. I knew it was coming and the company knew that those poor souls who were up all night deserved a little bit of comp-time to compensate for the extra mile they just donated.

I personally never minded extra hours if the project I was working on was interesting. Been there, done that many times. Probably too many times.

So in keeping with the goal of addressing both sides of this issue, I get it. Sometimes there is no other choice than to use PagerDuty and enforce an on-call rotation. But I think what employers would do well to remember is to not take the intrusion of work interfering with family life for granted. For some people it’s a very impactful feature of the job.

Worker bees should think long and hard before accepting a role that has on-call. Will an extra bit of money be worth having to carry your laptop with you everywhere? Will you be checking Slack for security breaches in bed when you’re supposed to be sleeping? Will you freak out if you can find your phone in the moment because you may have missed a page? If any of these things are true then I would suggest not agreeing to take on that role in the first place. Draw a line in the sand and stick to it. Family is more important.