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On a past team I set up on-call to be:

- Mon/Tue - Wed/Thu - Fri - Sat/Sun

Original reason for this schedule was that on-call was paid by days per quarter in a tiered system so this guaranteed that all members got the 5% on-call for 10 days/quarter rather than one person hitting 9 days and dropping to 3%, but I stand by this as a better on-call rotation.

The number of people does need to be not wholly divisible so the days rotate so if you run into this you can combine Fri into Sat/Sun or break Sat/Sun apart. It’s a bit complex to set up but the mental impact of on-call is greatly reduced and if you need a week for vacation you can much more easily find someone to cover your shift for a couple days in a nearby week rather than ending up with 2 weeks back to back 6 weeks from now. And if you pull a weekend you get the week off rather than losing your weekend to on-call and going into a work week still on-call.

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bigiain 3 days ago | parent [-]

Any company that makes it an employee's responsibility to find "someone to cover" their on call time while they're on vacation is a company worth quitting.

I'm pretty sure that'd be illegal here in .au

On call coverage while an employee is on vacation is a management problem, not an employee problem.

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glitchcrab 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Could not agree more, any company I've worked at with an on-call rotation has always ensured that staff are not scheduled when they have holiday booked. The only time an employee needed to find their own cover is if something unexpected came up during their on-call period and they needed a few hours out (like an emergency visit to the doctor with a child etc).

At my current job we have an automated scheduler which uses our gcal to ensure that it never schedules if people have an AFK entry. It also schedules fairly based on how long since the person was last on-call, not putting them on on a weekend if they were on last weekend etc (we do 24hr shifts).

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groestl 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

> The only time an employee needed to find their own cover is if something unexpected came up during their on-call period and they needed a few hours out (like an emergency visit to the doctor with a child etc).

That's exactly the time where "finding your own cover" is the most stressful.

	▲	glitchcrab 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I do see your point, but I think some context about where I work helps here. It's a very chilled company and all teams are very self-organising. In the case of me needing to find cover, I would just drop a message in our on-call slack channel and someone will almost always pick it up (and do the necessary stuff like adding an override in the opsgenie rotation). If nobody happens to see it (unlikely) then I would just let the alerts escalate to the next person who would be happy to pick it up because they know that people don't let alerts escalate without a good reason. Everyone cares about their colleagues so they want to help if they can (it's also quite a small company).

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jeduardo 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Are you using an in-house scheduler or is this a feature of a particular tool?

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glitchcrab 2 days ago | parent [-]

No this is an in-house tool. I would share the repo but for some reason it's private (not sure why, there's nothing confidential in it)

	▲	jeduardo 18 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Got it, thanks. Well, if you ever decide to open it up I'd be keen to having a look at it. I have yet to see a good automated scheduler and none of the places I've been so far had an automated solution that worked fine when it comes to holidays, scheduled time off, etc. A lot of manual work was put into scheduling shifts, which I always found very disappointing.

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thebigspacefuck 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Most companies are like this in my experience. You have some default rotation going out to forever and as part of planning vacation you check whether the time you are requesting is when you're scheduled for on-call and if so ask if someone else is available to swap on-call. If you can't find someone to cover, you raise to your manager and either they'll cover it or find someone else to cover.