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Discussion on: How does your team handle 'on call' evening/weekend hours?

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Gunnar Gissel

My team had a frank discussion with management about overtime and management decided that it could affort 10 hours of overtime/dev/year. This amounts to "we fix problems during regular business hours".

That's ok for us, because we're the government and our publicly facing software generally serves a group of people who have 10 days to get us the information. Assuming they don't wait until day 9 on a Saturday, slow weekend response is ok.

We do pay for a 24 hour help desk with a binder full of answers to common questions that people can call, which reduces the need for devs.

We talked about what we would do if 24/7, 365 responsiveness ever became necessary. Our feelings were that having enough devs to do 3 shifts, a la real 24 hour factory operations were probably the optimal solution, but failing the budget for that, rotating 2 weeks on, 2 weeks off on call duty seemed next best.