[HN Gopher] Being on Call
___________________________________________________________________
Being on Call
Author : colluder
Score : 104 points
Date : 2021-02-26 07:22 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (tyler.kim)
(TXT) w3m dump (tyler.kim)
| zelos wrote:
| I guess that helps explain stories like this:
|
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-56165762
|
| (tl;dr: North Korean man swam/walked round the DMZ and wasn't
| spotted for hours)
| postpawl wrote:
| "Five more on-call shifts will age me by two years."
|
| "By dawn, I can feel my internal organs are rotting."
|
| "Just gotta rinse and repeat till I'm out."
|
| Is the point of this entire post to invoke an existential crisis
| in readers?
|
| Why would you glorify hurting yourself like this?
| fy20 wrote:
| It sounds like OP is fulfilling the conscription requirements
| of their nation, so by "I'm out", they mean finished their
| military service.
| postpawl wrote:
| Ah, his next post talks about how he got done with his
| service: https://tyler.kim/army-review
|
| Wasn't sure if it was a career based on the context.
| sneak wrote:
| Perhaps to expose the horrors that comprise the slavery that he
| is unwillingly engaged in.
| mssundaram wrote:
| From what I know about the military in general, and mandatory
| military service in Korea, the author has no choice.
| wombatmobile wrote:
| > Why would you glorify hurting yourself like this?
|
| You sound disapproving, incredulous, or perhaps mystified, but
| you probably have similar dynamics in your own culture that you
| hardly notice.
|
| Do you not see the parallels with crunch coding, or all nighter
| heroics at law firms and brokerages?
|
| Or even the obesity that inevitably results from lifestyle
| advertising for junk food?
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I see the parallels, but I don't do those either, fuck that,
| there's no reward for that. It's a subculture that a small
| percentage of people are able to follow, and often only while
| they're young.
| wombatmobile wrote:
| Fair enough.
|
| Why do you think some other individuals embrace those
| behaviours?
| unixhero wrote:
| Being on call, this is more working actively and being attentive
| throughout almost all night!
| lostlogin wrote:
| Yes - the post describes shift work.
|
| Oncall is where you go in, then go home, then go in, then go
| home, but as you touch your back door, you are called back. You
| say something regrettable to the caller and then apologise.
| You're so tired your almost crying and can't get your laces
| done up. You drive in, can't recall the drive and the you are
| due back for your day shift in 2 hours.
| unixhero wrote:
| That's pretty funny. In IT it would be more like just getting
| phonecalls in the middle of the night and operating Service
| Now tickets, "Mr John Jackson, it is from mainframe services.
| We need you to file a ticket for team Z to restart service
| Bob and server Alice." Then go back to bed, and get well paid
| for it.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| I know what you mean, how small do they make violins anyway?
|
| In a 24/7/365 cargo operation for a hundred years the port
| chemists were on call to open their lab after hours and on
| weekends & holidays each time our ships came in, to operate
| the office no differently than when you get a vessel during
| the regular workday. But during regular office hours you
| definitely need to be there too. These ships are big and they
| don't always come in every day or on time very often. You get
| an ETA but very few things can make a vessel get there early,
| and many different things can delay a vessel, either case
| being unpredictable. For these call-outs excessive after-
| hours fees would be added to the nominal invoice, and good
| incentive pay would trickle down the food chain.
|
| Statistically since there are only 45 office-hours in a
| 168-hour week, most of the vessels had always incurred call-
| outs.
|
| After being in my own private practice for a while one day
| there was a little flood and lost everything I had worked for
| for 20 years.
|
| I could recover better financially with a business than a
| home, and I couldn't keep both so I gave up domestic life and
| started staying in the lab.
|
| Sure I was "homeless" but I had a roof over my head and I
| worked with what I had remaining, to survive attending to the
| vessels where I still had capability.
|
| Since I was always there, I made a deal with a small
| contractor to get right to work whenever they needed it,
| charging only decent basic fees per vessel regardless of
| after-hours. They were expected to benefit by not passing on
| this arrangement to the ultimate clients who would still be
| charged after-hours premiums, which was most of the time.
|
| It made survival possible and he was only revealing to
| clients that things were now covered 24/7 without having to
| wait for people to be called in. Within a few weeks all of
| the much bigger international operators in our ports had
| changed over to full 24 hr shift coverage along these lines
| just to compete with little old me, the homeless CEO.
| unixhero wrote:
| You deserve a bigger audience. Write more! Great story for
| my friday afternoon work procrastination.
|
| How is it going now? Are you still in this business?
| dijit wrote:
| This seems counter-productive. Humans with sleep deprivation are
| prone to mistakes (as the author admits).
|
| I know "we do what our bosses tell us"- but honestly if it was me
| I would be informing my boss that this is counter-productive and
| will cost the company (or in this case the country and it's
| countrymen). Much better to have staggered shifts or even a small
| night crew.
| ornornor wrote:
| > if it was me I would be informing my boss that this is
| counter-productive
|
| I suspect you're fairly new to the workforce. Try that for a
| few years, see how little effect it has but how much energy it
| sucks away from you, and then resign to simply doing "what the
| bosses want" even if it means setting piles of cash on fire on
| a regular basis.
| zxcvbn4038 wrote:
| One place I worked had six operators on site 24/7 in a restricted
| access floor of the building. At any time five of them would be
| asleep and the sixth would watch the cameras and wake everyone up
| whenever someone arrived in the elevator lobby. They had there
| own rotation of who would be woke and who got to sleep. Even
| during the weekday no one could gain access to their room without
| being buzzed in, so their manager was none the wiser. He found a
| pillow one day but it was explained away as belonging to one of
| the operator's kids and that answer satisfied him.
| yuliyp wrote:
| What is the point of such a crazy schedule? If someone has to do
| a double-graveyard shift and is basically useless the rest of the
| week, why not just split that shift into two so you don't destroy
| all of the people who try to cover such shifts.
|
| People can generally work 4-12 without much trouble or needing to
| recover after it other than weekends. Doing 12-8 might be an
| every other night kind of thing. Having a couple people handing
| those off might just cover it.
| choeger wrote:
| Military organizations tend to detach personal for long shifts
| so the remaining unit can stay somewhat functional in their
| normal schedule.
|
| When I was on guard duty it was usually a 24h shift followed by
| a 24h break for a group of 8 or 10 privates and 2 NCOs. That
| means that roughly a quarter of the company is permanently
| detached. If you switch to 12hour shifts, you have to consider
| that normal operations take place during daytime. At any day
| you then have three groups unavailable: One on duty, one
| resting from the night shift, and one preparing for the night
| shift.
| redisman wrote:
| It's part of the military training. Find your physical and
| mental limits and then break them.
| smcl wrote:
| The author is in the military - I've read a fair few things by
| current and former service members and two of the most common
| themes are:
|
| - the disregard for health and wellbeing of each soldier
|
| - being required to do nonsensical things that are
| counterproductive and likely compromise medium-to-long term
| goals of the outfit you're attached to
|
| So I agree with what you said - there is very likely a way to
| schedule these shifts so that these problems do not occur. The
| Army has little interest in this though, their requirement is
| that the shifts need to be covered and they currently are so
| there is no problem.
|
| edit: updated comment to be country agnostic
| pram wrote:
| One particular experience that stands out when I was in the
| Air Force was some Sergeant changing our physical training
| time from after work to 5:30AM. As in everyone commutes to
| the base and is in formation at that time. It was just
| sadistic torture essentially lol
| cosmodisk wrote:
| This is a good example of why I didn't want to join the
| army. I understand the importance of instilling order and
| readiness,but it can be done in many ways, not necessarily
| with 'just because I can'. I've heard countless examples
| like this, the worst being where some poor guys had to
| carry a cigarette butt on stretches for a few miles, then
| dig a massive pit and bury it.
| postpawl wrote:
| The author says he's in the ROK (republic of Korea) army:
| https://tyler.kim/army-review
| smcl wrote:
| OH I should amend my post then! I suspect that this sort of
| stuff is international anyway
| andrewem wrote:
| The United States Navy had serious problems with work demands
| causing sleep deprivation. Here's a news story about a policy
| update they made:
|
| "The "Comprehensive Crew Endurance Management Policy," signed
| off Dec. 11 by Naval Surface Force Pacific and Naval Surface
| Force Atlantic, is the first update to the joint instruction
| issued just months after two 2017 fatal at-sea collisions
| rocked the Navy."
|
| Basically the crews were too tired to think clearly and
| crashed into things, causing damage and deaths on their
| ships.
|
| https://news.usni.org/2021/01/28/latest-surface-navy-
| sleep-p...
| solatic wrote:
| It's like that quote about how the market can stay irrational
| longer than you can stay solvent - the organization can stay
| dysfunctional longer than you can stay sane. For any truly big
| system, inertia is a more powerful force than you think.
|
| The isn't a strategic or tactical purpose that makes this kind
| of situation an intentional or desired outcome. Any
| sufficiently large organization, and this especially holds true
| by militaries, are typified by the following two
| characteristics. First, turnover at scale necessarily prevents
| the rank-and-file, in aggregate, from learning and developing
| over time. Every year, X number of people will leave the
| organization for reasons the organization can't control
| (retirement, spouses moving, legal mandates, whatever) and they
| will be replaced by people who are completely unfamiliar with
| the organization and any lessons the people leaving may have
| learned. Not replacing the people leaving will leave positions
| unfilled, which is untenable, so they will be filled by whoever
| is around to fill the chair. This is inevitable and
| unavoidable. Second, there are only so many issues that upper
| management can focus on. By the time people rise up through the
| ranks and get into a position where they have the power to do
| anything, the vast majority of what it means to exercise that
| power is to act like a hospital at a mass casualty event -
| triage for the most critical issues that need your attention
| and trust that a solid reliance on process will prevent
| anything else from collapsing.
|
| If you're looking for logic then you don't understand how these
| organizations work.
| goatinaboat wrote:
| _If you 're looking for logic then you don't understand how
| these organizations work_
|
| The logic is that everyone must be replaceable on a moments
| notice because they might be shot and someone else will need
| to pick up that job. Having roles that you need to be
| intimately familiar with in order to be effective is the
| exact opposite of what the military needs. If a job can be
| done by someone with minimal training while desperately
| sleep-deprived then that is perfect for their needs.
| etripe wrote:
| Even in offices, the _myth_ is that everyone is replaceable
| at a moment 's notice, because that is a comfortable
| thought for those in charge that makes it easier to play
| "4D chess" with the corporate pawns and integrate
| seamlessly with quarterly and yearly budgets. It's based on
| the law of averages and cements ending up with mediocre
| workers and products at best.
|
| Exceptional workers in key (non-management) positions will
| take whatever they've learned with them, never to return.
| That leads to failed excavation projects looking for the
| original reasoning and business logic. Then, things need to
| be recreated from scratch because there is no alternative
| besides hiring the former worker as an expensive
| consultant. All because people failed to plan ahead and
| guarantee actual continuity, focusing exclusively on the
| small subset of elementary tasks. In the end, the work
| becomes more disorganised and product/service quality
| suffers because of gaps in domain knowledge, context and
| competence.
|
| That myth might be relatively harmless in the primary and
| secondary sectors to a large degree, but is actively
| harmful in the tertiary, quaternary and quinary sectors. If
| you factor in that most of the work - both in terms of
| quality and volume - is done by a small minority of
| employees, the prevailing management dogma is costing
| companies lots of money to entertain the notion that worker
| retention is a secondary consideration. It's especially
| myopic because it usually doesn't take a whole lot to keep
| people happy in their jobs, leveraged as they are by their
| own obligations.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Yes, a lot of this kind of "everyone is replaceable" 4D
| chess mentality of management leads to a fat middle.
|
| I've seen this both at large, stodgy organizations that
| have frequent layoffs and at smaller organizations with
| Frank Underwood CTOs.
|
| Bottom performers get managed out on the firms schedule,
| but top performers find their way out on their own
| schedule. This can lead to great chaos.. people getting
| un-fired, throwing money at the key man risks you
| accidentally created, and over-correcting with too-fast
| over-hiring which then leads to inevitable future
| firings.
| solatic wrote:
| That's an ideal, not the reality. The reality is actually
| pretty frequently similar to the private sector - someone
| is the only person who knows how to do something, they
| leave, and they're replaced by someone who doesn't know how
| to do it and picks things up as they go along. It's one of
| the reasons why militaries can feel pretty dysfunctional.
| The only way of ensuring that people are adequately
| replaceable is to have formal training programs, and the
| only way of ensuring that those training programs improve
| over time is to have a feedback loop to take in lessons
| from the field and to keep abreast of updates to the state-
| of-the-art. Ultimately this is too costly, even for
| militaries, with possible rare exceptions in small special-
| ops type units where people do rotate between operations
| and training and rarely de-facto leave the unit and as
| such, do not suffer from the same manpower pressures of
| most military units while enjoying attention of upper
| management when desired.
| Clewza313 wrote:
| Welcome to Hell Korea. The country is infamous for poor working
| conditions, particularly in the military, where the author was
| apparently serving out their mandatory military service.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell_Joseon
|
| http://www.koreatimesus.com/hazing-deaths-in-korea-disturbin...
| bayindirh wrote:
| I'm not military, but worked with them for two years, sometimes
| with similar schedules.
|
| My view about being a soldier, a serviceman has changed
| drastically during that projects. The cause is noble, and the
| thing they're doing is _very hard_. Make no mistake here.
|
| On the other hand, they're stripped of their emotions and
| humanity to an extent. They become something else, an hardened
| being after some time.
|
| Because, they need to do what has to be done and they shouldn't
| think through it, but just act.
|
| I'm a grandson of a commander. I love soldiers, but this is how
| they're trained, and this is how they should be to be able to
| perform this duty.
| watwut wrote:
| Imo, whether being soldier is noble depends very very much on
| which army you are in and what are current goals and conduct
| of said army.
| closeparen wrote:
| A society gets no points for having noble goals if it lacks
| the capacity to attain them.
| zdkl wrote:
| One could argue the qualities of a soldier or officer
| (individuals) transcend their organisational context
| (groups) and time. In other words: politics, technology or
| best practices change, not the responsabilities. The
| ability (necessity, even) to adapt to that fact defines a
| fit-for-service soldier/officer.
|
| So, I contend you find remarkable soldiers even in terrible
| groups, and that they (individuals) should not be judged on
| their group but on their own qualities of service.
|
| Whether you find those parameters noble is entirely
| subjective and not mine to question but I do believe anyone
| who sincerely understands and accepts these obligations
| deserves respect, as an individual.
| watwut wrote:
| > So, I contend you find remarkable soldiers even in
| terrible groups, and that they (individuals) should not
| be judged on their group but on their own qualities of
| service.
|
| So, we should praise ISIS fighters? I am intentionally
| picking up example of extreme, but very real
| organization. Same question can be asked about SS
| members. They knew what they joined. Does them doing good
| job in that organization is really praise worthy?
|
| The better quality their service was, the more victims
| they have.
| bayindirh wrote:
| > So, we should praise ISIS fighters?
|
| You're distorting it. I was trying to point out that,
| they have to deform themselves to somewhat non-human
| states.
|
| It's not valid only for servicemen. Firefighters are
| same. Police are same. Long haul truckers, cargo ship
| crew are same.
|
| I think everybody making sacrifices for doing what they
| find worthy are eligible for some respect. They accept to
| deform themselves to do something they find value in.
|
| Do not add ethnicity, politics, geography, race into
| this. It's about being human, and other parts are neither
| part of my comment nor has place in this specific thread.
| watwut wrote:
| I am not distorting. I am using unambiguous example of
| what I have in mind.
|
| > soldiers even in terrible groups, and that they
| (individuals) should not be judged on their group but on
| their own qualities of service.
|
| Unless you was forced into that group, which was not case
| of SS but in some cases could be ISIS, you know what you
| were joining.
|
| I don't think sacrifice itself is worth respect, if the
| goal of that sacrifice is destructive and wrong. If you
| sacrifice yourself in service of group that does genocide
| or tortures to get power and so on, you did genocide and
| tortured people so that your group have power. The
| ideology of "sacrifice is worth respect no matter what"
| empowers exactly these groups first. Believing this makes
| people more likely to join these.
|
| The victims, especially those who stood against that
| group should be celebrated. Those who said "no" deserve
| respect. Those who were avoiding still deserve more
| respect.
| bayindirh wrote:
| > I don't think sacrifice itself is worth respect, if the
| goal of that sacrifice is destructive and wrong.
|
| Wrong is a _subjective_ term and relative to viewing
| point. This is _exactly_ what I 'm avoiding here. I'm not
| discussing whether it's right or wrong from one
| particular perspective. Moreover, I'm trying to direct
| discussion away from war and other sensitive matters with
| all the power I have with my words, but you want to
| fixate the subject to ISIS and other terrorist
| organizations, that's fine.
|
| As a citizen of a country which has to defend against
| terrorism in point-blank distances, I understand you, but
| forcing the subject to this perspective is not correct,
| at least in this context. Especially me, as the OP,
| trying to clarify it further.
|
| My family is a victim of a genocide, but world won't
| acknowledge it. With your reasoning my family was on the
| wrong side, in a war which they weren't actively
| participating and was not killing anyone.
|
| When a TV channel renames the people killing our
| citizens, they become heroes. They become right and we
| become wrong. Hah.
|
| So, don't pull this into politics, war, genocides and
| other stuff. That tar pit is not a part of this
| conversation. It shouldn't be.
|
| Leave it here. End of this slope is not pretty.
| bayindirh wrote:
| Thanks for clarifying. This is _exactly_ what I was
| trying to compose in my mind as an answer, but unable to
| do so.
| devchix wrote:
| I carried a pager for a short while, pager, remember those? On-
| call weeks were hell, even when nothing happened. It's the
| expectation of getting the call, and the expectation that a
| system outside your primary domain of expertise will be down. I
| wasn't paid enough to weather the stress, and I don't think
| there's a hard number to suit every one. If I ever had input to
| how an on-call rotation should be handled, I'd make it a pair of
| on-call persons. They'd switch off as they please, but there will
| always be 2 persons coordinating the response. One person could
| come in, with the other person on the phone, or both.
|
| It's the loneliness. Somewhere in this vast organization
| connected with pipes that no one single person has put together,
| some element would break. Mercifully the impact ripples and you
| kinda know about the subsystems to track down the leak and patch
| it up and alert the domain owners for the next working day.
| You're the person they're going to call, there's no cavalry, it's
| you looking at incomprehensible gibberish while the rest of the
| world is asleep. Even the desk who has called you doesn't get
| involved, they're done. For me, the idea that it's just me until
| it's fixed (or degrades further), was the hardest thing to cope
| with.
|
| I'd pair up my ideal on-call team. It'll cost more, but I'll pay
| it.
|
| Incidentally pagers are still being carried in SCIFs, where there
| are no mobiles and sometimes no outside line.
| bob1029 wrote:
| I was also on pager duty with physical pagers many years ago.
|
| The perspective I had was that it was a rite of passage for a
| systems engineer. I noticed that only the more junior engineers
| were on front-line duty. I believe the thinking was that by
| forcing junior engineers to go through pager duty, they would
| be much more diligent when they propose, create or approve
| changes down the road. Whether or not this is a perverse
| incentive which ultimately ruins productivity & team morale is
| a separate conversation...
|
| We had a primary & backup who got paged at the same time (due
| to the financial implications of timing), so there wasn't a
| total sense of isolation. But, there was definitely that sense
| of helplessness when it turned out to be a problem in a totally
| different system (and country). Worrying about something going
| down definitely kept you on a tight leash with regard to WiFi
| and laptop accessibility. We did get a little wild with the
| wording on the policy. Some bars downtown had excellent WiFi,
| so when some of us were on call during Friday/Saturday we would
| just make sure we had a laptop in the car and pager on body.
| Definitely not the best situation to be in, but for some teams
| the amount of time you were on pager duty could be measured in
| _years_.
| abrookins wrote:
| This matches my experience of 24-hour on-call DBaaS shifts.
| 8fingerlouie wrote:
| We have our "ops" guys that monitors the environments, and a list
| of people for each system that is more or less always on call.
| Each service/job that is being monitored has a
| procedure/description for how to respond to failures, and if
| nothing else works, the people on the list gets a call.
|
| You're not required to take the call, but you get a fairly large
| sum of money if you do, meaning people usually take the call
| despite not being required to.
|
| Because of laws here, you're required to have 11 hours of
| uninterrupted "free time" after leaving work (no laws on how long
| a work day is), so taking a call usually means you violate that,
| which in turn restarts the clock on your "free time", meaning
| you're entitled to "sleep in" on company time the next day. Doing
| so of course wreaks havoc on all planning, so very few people
| actually take the full 11 hours off, and instead just get in
| "late" around 9am.
|
| Edit: I should probably have explained that the calls happen on
| average once per system every 2-4 weeks, and the amount of people
| on call is probably limited to <5%-10% of the engineers.
| eudajmonia wrote:
| It is similar in Poland. Here most colleagues can start between
| 6-9am and finish between 14-17. This is inclusive of a formal
| 30 minute lunch break and 10 minute breaks every 1 hour. (In
| practice most people just take 1 hour lunch instead). I enjoy
| this because I have much more time outside of the office to
| enjoy my life.
| antihero wrote:
| In what hellish sort of company is 9AM "late"?
| gambiting wrote:
| I sometimes wonder where the hell most HNers work where 9am
| is _not_ considered late start. At a warehouse I worked at
| the shift was 6am to 2pm. And it was great that way as you
| avoided most of the summer heat. The software company where I
| work now, 8am is standard, that way you 're nicely done at
| 4pm and have the entire evening to yourself. My wife is also
| a programmer and usually starts at 7:30am because that's
| their first scrum.
| p10jkle wrote:
| I work in the UK with mostly US team. Start at 10:30am or
| so
| cosmodisk wrote:
| More important question is what time do you finish then?
| datavirtue wrote:
| You know....2-3pm.
| [deleted]
| viraptor wrote:
| 9-5 is pretty common in the US and UK companies. Dolly
| Parton had a song about it...
| Natfan wrote:
| In the UK I'm 9am to 5pm, however my contract allows for
| unpaid overtime. Usually management are pretty good with
| this though, and give some unofficial time off in lieu if I
| have to work OT.
| 8fingerlouie wrote:
| > my contract allows for unpaid overtime
|
| Unless i was in serious financial trouble, or in a
| learning situation, i would never accept a contract that
| "allows for unpaid overtime".
|
| Most of the companies i know don't allow for "paid free
| time", so why should i give away my time for free to
| increase profits for the company ?
|
| The exception to this is of course "job salary", but i
| never accept those either unless i have a say in what
| exactly makes up the "job" part, and i usually tell the
| employer that "job salary" goes both ways, so if i'm done
| with my job Wednesday afternoon, i'll say "enjoy your
| weekend" and be back next monday. That's when we usually
| agree on paid overtime :)
| gambiting wrote:
| >>Unless i was in serious financial trouble, or in a
| learning situation, i would never accept a contract that
| "allows for unpaid overtime".
|
| At least in the UK the law specifically forbids working
| more than 48 hours a week, so it's pretty common to see
| contracts where you opt out of this regulation. Not
| because the company even intends to make you work
| overtime, but because if you happened to work more, even
| entirely out of your own free will, you could still sue
| the company for working more than 48 hours in a week. So
| it's a very common thing to add in contracts here.
| llampx wrote:
| It's funny. A regulation, that you can opt out of, with
| an adhesion contract.
| hackbinary wrote:
| You can also opt back into the working time directive.
| bengale wrote:
| I don't think I've ever worked on a development team where
| you could book a meeting before 10:30am and expect the team
| to be there.
|
| I've always liked an early start for an early finish, I was
| one of the very few working early though in most places.
| astura wrote:
| Back in ancient times, my first software job was with an
| crusty old fashioned company. We were required to be in
| before 8am, many people arrived as early as 6am. Dress
| code was also very strict (but more lenient than it was
| historically)
|
| My second software job was with a company that was just
| as old but much more modern (not startup-ish). the boss
| required the team to be in before 9am, daily team meeting
| was at 9.
|
| My job now has flextime with core hours between either
| 10-3 or 10-2 (can't recall which) but very few people
| arrive after 9am. All other jobs I've worked have
| flextime with similar core hours, there was only one job
| that had a true "no rules" approach.
| bengale wrote:
| My preferred hours used to be 730-330. The last place I
| was at the majority turned up around 930, and then milled
| about drinking coffee and chatting for the first hour or
| so.
| rorykoehler wrote:
| In Berlin the normal start time is 10am
| llampx wrote:
| Unless you are at a German non-startup company. Then you
| have people rolling in at 6-7am even in the winter.
| rorykoehler wrote:
| I bet they leave early too and go pick up their kids.
| 8fingerlouie wrote:
| > starts at 7:30am because that's their first scrum
|
| We have scrum inside mandatory hours. There's a fairly
| strict company policy that you cannot schedule _recurring_
| meetings outside mandatory hours, and if you do, you cannot
| expect people to attend, so scrum here is 9am. Even
| scheduling non recurring meetings outside mandatory hours
| is frowned upon.
|
| As for the schedule itself, it fits nicely with (european)
| family life. My kids start school at 8am, so i usually drop
| them off at school on my way to work, and get in around
| 8:30am (before COVID anyway). I get off work at 4pm, and
| have the entire evening with my family.
|
| I'm aware that at least some parts of the US has (or had ?)
| a much more fluid line between work and free time, where
| people will leave work to have lunch with their family,
| return to work, leave to watch a soccer game (or whatever),
| and return to work, and leave work around 7pm.
|
| To me that sounds much more hellish than just working 8am
| to 4pm :)
| bobthepanda wrote:
| This isn't super common where I am (although you can do
| it). I had a coworker who practiced something like this
| so they could go to the gym in the afternoon when it
| would be less crowded. Or for the soccer example, not
| much of a choice if you want to watch live European
| sports.
|
| Also at least in Seattle it seems like every doctor's
| office keeps bankers hours (M-F 9-5) so you would have to
| disrupt your own workday to go to an appointment, though
| in practice I haven't known people to bother putting in
| extra work if their projects are reasonably getting done
| on time.
| secondcoming wrote:
| I start at 10am but used eat lunch at my desk. It was
| mainly to avoid the London tube rush hour in the mornings.
| bierjunge wrote:
| I'm working for a small(er) (30ish people) software company
| and 9am is the general start of the work day, but it's not
| regulated or enforced. Some people start at 8am, but I for
| myself start mostly around 10am, except there are some
| meetings before.
|
| There are only two rules:
|
| - get the job done
|
| - be in the important meetings/calls
| taylodl wrote:
| There are 10 kinds of developers in the world...
|
| Those who like to start their day mid morning and those who
| like to start their day early morning. To accommodate
| everyone a lot of companies use a standard "core time" of
| 10-2 where _everyone_ needs to be in the office.
| ricksunny wrote:
| It's sad that different chronotypes aren't taken into
| account for work schedules. There are many an individual
| contributor, and manager, who naturally outperform outside
| of the usual 9-5 framework. Formally it's called Delayed
| Sleep Phase Syndrome (DSPS). Practically these are the
| people whose ancestors were guarding the tribe keeping it
| safe at night.
| luftbbb wrote:
| That's a really interesting take regarding the ancestral
| thing. It makes me wonder... In part, we are basically a
| genetic sum of our ancestors
| dd_roger wrote:
| There's no company policy mandating me to start that early
| yet I start between 7am and 7:30am, by 8am the office is
| mostly full.
|
| The earlier you start the more daylight left to enjoy at the
| end of the day. 9am really sounds awfully late. People who
| start at 9 don't enjoy their morning any more than I do. They
| just wake up later. And it forces them to stay longer in the
| evening while I'm out taking advantage of the extra day light
| to do outdoor activities.
| jmdeon wrote:
| >People who start at 9 don't enjoy their morning any more
| than I do.
|
| I am a morning person which means I really treasure my
| morning coffee and jazz music and reading time. I wake up
| at 7am and enjoy two sweet hours of a cold, dreamy morning
| before starting work fresh at 9am.
|
| I am a night person which means I really treasure my
| nightly herbal tea and hip hop music and comic book time. I
| take a hot shower at 10pm before wandering into bed sleepy
| at 10:45pm.
|
| None of this is rigid but I just feel like you are making
| super subjective arguments about a person's choice in time
| to work and sleep and live their life.
| znpy wrote:
| Indeed.
|
| I've seen some companies that clock the hours you're "in
| the building" and allow coming up early to leave early.
|
| What happens in practice is that some people will come in
| early, start working early, and leave early. Some other
| people will check-in early, enjoy the office-provided
| amenities in the empty office, and actually start working
| when the rest of the team gets in the office.
|
| Some smarter company just ask you to check-in before, say,
| 10 am and don't care when you leave (either early or late
| -- and don't require you to check-out explicitly by passing
| the badge) -- it's up to you and your boss/manager: as long
| as you meet the deadline, leave as soon or as late as you
| see fit.
| Nannooskeeska wrote:
| I'm with you 100%. I'm usually the first one in the office
| (well, pre-COVID anyway) and the first one to leave.
| Anecdotally, it's same since we started working from home -
| I usually try to start around 7-7:30am, and I generally
| don't start getting replies from coworkers until 8:30am or
| later.
|
| I see a lot of threads and comments about starting at
| 9-10am, and I don't understand it. I'm usually eating lunch
| at 11am and done with work by 3:30pm. It's so nice! The few
| times I've had to work until 5-6pm have been awful for me.
| I feel like I don't really have any time to really DO
| anything before bed.
| throwaway7033 wrote:
| Our normal start time is before 9 am and many people start
| work much earlier; the company is on the Fortune 100 Best
| Places to work list.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| When I worked in Austria and Germany, most employees started
| between 6:00 and 8:00 AM at the latest. Although there was
| nothing against coming in after 9:00 AM due to flex-time, it
| would guarantee you'd miss all the morning coffee chit-chat
| with internal company gossip and by the time you'd leave work
| and head to the city, the shops would already be close to
| closing.
| gambiting wrote:
| Yeah that's the other thing. A lot of shops and agencies
| close at 5pm, so if your come in to work at 10am and work
| until 6pm? Everything is closed once you leave, good luck
| getting anything done after work.
| znpy wrote:
| If you come in at work at 10am you might have as well
| done that trip to the shop/agency before coming to work.
| tharkun__ wrote:
| Unfortunately not because most shops in Germany opened at
| 10am. It's much better nowadays in that AG least grocery
| stores are open to 10pm.
| pishpash wrote:
| MBA-run sweatshops.
| 8fingerlouie wrote:
| Mandatory hours for most employees is "9am to 3pm". Opening
| hours for our customers is 10am to 4pm. Everybody is employed
| at 36 hours /week.
|
| Most people get in between 7am and 8am, and leave between 3pm
| and 4pm.
| DocG wrote:
| We have the same policy. Mandatory hours so there is common
| time where everyone is at work, but if you do your other
| hours after or before mandatory hours is up to you. Works
| really well. There is plenty of time when everyone is at
| work and can communicate but late and early people can set
| they schedule as they like. Plenty of tasks to do when you
| don't need other people.
| datavirtue wrote:
| There is zero need for mandatory hours. Adults know when
| they need to be available for their team.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| Just curious, in which country is 36hours/week standard? Or
| is it just your company?
| 8fingerlouie wrote:
| I think most of Europe has a 37 hour/week work schedule,
| and because "we're better" we have 36 hour/week.
|
| At least some of mainland Europe: Germany, France,
| Scandinavia, and IIRC the UK.
| darkwater wrote:
| AFAIK only France has a 35hrs week (7h/day), most of the
| other countries has 40hrs week.
| eudajmonia wrote:
| If we are counting actual working hours, it is also 7
| hours a day in Poland. (8hr/day inclusive of 30 minutes
| lunch plus cumulative 30 minute break from staring at a
| screen).
| sdevonoes wrote:
| Last gig I had in Germany: it was 40h/week. I never seen
| a 36h/week schedule in France either... (I'm talking
| about standard software engineer positions).
| sofixa wrote:
| In France base is 35h/week, 37/39 are frequent with the
| extra 2-4h hours then available 1:1 as extra vacation
| time ( RTT, you get hours on top of 35 worked over the
| year / 7 ( standard work day) of them over the year).
|
| I'm currently on 35, might move to 37 ( majority at my
| company).
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| Ok, but where are you located? Where is "here" and who is
| "we're"?
|
| Europe is not a single country but every EU nations has
| different labor laws and working hour contracts.
| thebackup wrote:
| I'm in Sweden, so Scandinavia. Every company I know has
| 40h work weeks. Lunch break is not included so if you
| start working at 8, take a 1 hour lunch break around 12,
| then you can log off at 17.
| 8fingerlouie wrote:
| The normal (office) working hours here are 37.5 hours per
| week, excluding lunch break, which is usually 30 minutes.
| That breaks down to 7.5 hours of work + 30 minutes of
| lunch break, meaning you get in at 8am and leave at 4pm.
| gambiting wrote:
| Here in UK 37.5h is standard. 8 hour days with mandatory
| 30 minutes for lunch.
| emptyfile wrote:
| Same in Croatia, I honestly thought it was standard in
| the EU with exceptions such as France.
|
| Spending 9 hours at work seems awful even if your lunch
| break is 60 min instead of 30.
| sdevonoes wrote:
| I know it's not a popular idea, but here it goes anyway: senior
| software engineers, please say NO to being on call. It just puts
| some much pressure on engineers (like me) who don't want to be on
| call in exchange of more money: managers then think of you as
| someone who is not very commited to the company, bla bla bla...
|
| I'm commited to the company I work at any given time, from 9am to
| 5pm. That's all the time a company can get from me.
| viraptor wrote:
| So once both senior and non-senior engineers opt out of on-
| call, who do you expect to take care of issues that happen out
| of hours? (In case of companies who deal with 24h traffic and
| transactions)
| sdevonoes wrote:
| Dedicated people hired as such.
| viraptor wrote:
| That's realistically out of reach for non-enterprise
| companies. If they're not primarily standard senior
| engineers doing typical day work, you need at least 4
| people to cover the on-call week + redundancies for leave.
| You're talking about employing a whole extra team just to
| handle an occasional callout.
| whatsmyusername wrote:
| I'm in ops. Devs don't need to be on call, but if it gets to
| the point where I need you and you refuse to assist, expect
| your property to get zero time or attention going forward.
|
| Dedicated on call exists because this is an incredibly common
| problem. People talk about being a team, until something's on
| fire at a weird hour.
|
| If it's a megacorp, sure yeah whatever. It's not like our
| compensation is tied to product performance. I'll do my due
| dilligence, document everything, and just leave it down till
| business hours handoff (this isn't hyperbole, this is exactly
| how I would handle it).
|
| If it's a startup? Leave me hanging and you'll instantly burn
| all the good will I have toward you. And I've got a direct horn
| to your boss and the CEO.
| leokennis wrote:
| In my opinion, it's almost mandatory for a well functioning
| software development environment to have developers on call
| (next to ops people).
|
| Bugs that get you woken up in the middle of the night are fixed
| in no time. Documentation that is lacking, or spaghetti code,
| both preventing you from quickly fixing an issue instead of
| spending hours on it? Fixed the next day.
|
| If the stakes of writing bad code are low, code quality will
| suffer. No better fix for those low stakes than being on call.
| sdevonoes wrote:
| > No better fix for those low stakes than being on call.
|
| I prefer a company with a strong tech culture: code review,
| thinkg long-term (marathons instead of sprints) and design
| systems with architecture-first on mind (instead of feature-
| first), automated testing, QA people, don't deploy on
| Fridays...
| pc86 wrote:
| If you've got testing, code reviews, QA, and CI/CD, Friday
| deployments should be totally fine.
| sdevonoes wrote:
| The point is "Friday deployments" are not needed (unless
| we are talking about hotfixes). What's the use case?
| Can't it wait until Monday? Why are all in such a rush?
| pc86 wrote:
| I would say that if things are tested appropriately (it's
| a big if, and not an easy thing to do honestly), when you
| commit a new feature it should go through the testing
| process and right into production. If that makes you
| nervous then there's more testing that needs to be added.
| Canary deployments with extensive monitoring and
| automated rollbacks and make this almost entirely hands-
| off.
|
| For most software systems the goal should be to abstract
| away the actual act of "deploying" and let the
| infrastructure handle that on its own.
| pc86 wrote:
| There are absolutely some industries where this makes sense
| (life-saving health care, national defense, things like
| Amazon where you literally stop making money when things go
| down).
|
| 90% of developers don't work in these industries or on these
| types of projects. Hell, I work in healthcare, for a private
| company, and there is zero reason for any of us to be on
| call. Patient quality doesn't suffer one iota if our software
| is down, which it rarely is.
|
| It really sounds like you're advocating that developers be on
| call to "fix" the "problem" that there's no reason for them
| to be on call?
| Areading314 wrote:
| Sounds like an absolutely lazy and incompetent person. People
| need to really think about their job situations in the broader
| context that sometimes you just have to be there and be ready to
| work and be available. Not every job is a "creative" 9-5 job that
| you can work remotely, there are many types of applications where
| it is required that someone can be there to resolve issues as
| they come up. And theres nothing wrong with that.
| bipson wrote:
| I don't understand the article on many levels... Is it supposed
| to be hyperbole?
|
| - Flatulence is not "you rotting from the inside"
|
| - I have friends that have (had) night-shifts back-to-back to a
| regular shift, and were on-call for for several nights a month.
| They never failed to answer the phone. They worked as the on-call
| doctor for a whole station in a clinic, not answering or not
| listening would have been disastrous! They admitted to be
| "zombies" but they were functional.
|
| I'm not saying that this doesn't sound like hell, and I seriously
| am glad I never accepted a job with on-call duties, but this form
| of hyperbole rubs me the wrong way.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| If you've actually never been on call, it's hard to understand
| the way the body responds without experiencing it really.
|
| Having every other weekend cut short as you always need to be
| near a PC from 4pm Sunday...
|
| The sheer terror of being woken up from a deep sleep after a
| long night of work just as you've finally fallen asleep...
|
| Resigning yourself to not sleeping as you finally close out the
| call, full of adrenaline as you see the first glimmers of light
| in the sky...
|
| Knowing the problem is the same problem as last week, last
| month, and that the causes are things outside your control (the
| 1 staffer in Asia being sick or on holiday, insufficient
| hardware CTO won't upgrade, bugs in orphaned upstream systems,
| political turf wars)...
|
| etc
| postit wrote:
| That's pretty much how a newborn moms feels in the first 6
| months.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| I remember having to nurse the batch jobs in the morning when I
| was working in app support. I had trained my spouse to look out
| for the yellow "failed" line and let me know when I was away from
| the laptop getting freshened up; failures weren't super common
| but they did happen and such incidents basically took the best
| part of the day towards investigation/clean-up/root-cause-
| analysis summary and such activities. That experience helped me
| swear off any kind of support role and instilled a lot of empathy
| towards support staff.
| wombatmobile wrote:
| It is normal for governments to treat defense personnel like
| soldier ants. The reasons for this date back hundreds of millions
| of years.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I mean, I get military discipline; in war, you need to be able
| to rely on your people, they need to do what they are told and
| not question things because we'll be here for a while, etc.
|
| But this is a guy at a desk on a night shift who seems to be
| mentally dead most of the time anyway, to the point where he's
| not able to do his duty (sleep through phones), AND he handles
| ammunition in this (self described) half dead state.
|
| The military knows the risks of sleep deprivation and half
| awake personnel.
| angarg12 wrote:
| What is the point of this article?
|
| As far as oncall go, this is an anti-pattern. You should have
| metrics, alarms and tickets, and oncall should get alerted out of
| working hours only of high impact issues that require human
| intervention.
|
| If it is about the requirement to pull all nighters or crazy
| schedules, some jobs do it in a regular basis (I would know, my
| sister is a nurse in a hospital).
| mssundaram wrote:
| Do you mean what is the point of being on call? If you really
| mean the point of the article it's simply for the author to
| share his experience. From what I know of Korea and the
| military in general, he has no choice.
| randyrand wrote:
| > Most of the work is answering and making calls, updating
| documents, and making sure that nothing is out of the ordinary.
|
| This is not a programming / automated position.
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