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This! Whenever someone talk about on-call this aspect of that rotation gets swept under the carpet. Whenever I interview I always ask whether they have on-call system (they must if there are servers and apps involved) and if they do whether they have follow the sun.

Most don’t even like the question. For them such questions are red flags or the candidate is not “motivated enough”. Rarely some even have follow the sun policy. They might have one in their HQ, true for a lot of US/EU firms, but their offices in a developing country like India - it’s always something on the lines of “oh, engineers here take full ownership; they are the owners”.

Also, I have seen — 2-3 days rotation with follow the sun is best, week long or longer being worst.

Then there are companies where it could be forever on-call with no follow the sun - e.g. Amazon, Uber (in India at least). That’s another world altogether.

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martin-t 3 days ago | parent [-]

"If they're the owners, do they get all the profit?" When you know you're not gonna work somewhere, might as well have fun raising eyebrows.

Cooperatives really should be more common.

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Seattle3503 3 days ago | parent [-]

I mean it sounds clever, but how do you have engineers with no expertise in a system handling calls for it? I've been at places that follow the sun, and you frequently have no idea what to do during an incident, because the person who owns the system is offline. But at least you can sit one a useless incident call during work hours instead of completing your own tickets I suppose.

	▲	achierius 3 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The point is that the "ownership" used to rhetorically justify the labor of such engineers is not "ownership" at all: it's missing the literal most important aspect, that is the ability to profit proportionally as a project brings in revenue. Literally everything else is included -- the intensity of work, the singular focus, the care and devotion, the expected level of initiative -- but not the part that would most benefit the engineer. It's just rhetorical trickery.
	▲	Braini 3 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		There should be SOPs in place for each "expected" issue so people know what to do. Its not like you (should) start debugging and deploying stuff in the middle of your on-call shift anyway. Its not 100% for sure but in the normal case this should be fine.