The Tension of Being On-Call

Cindy Sridharan on the state of being on-call

“being on-call is uniquelyencroaching upon an engineer’s personal time in ways writing documentation or refactoring code or improving test coverage are not. While the latter can be done during work hours, on-call is something that is all-consuming, effectively handcuffing one to their laptop and phone for the entire duration of the on-call.

It’s worth internalizing the part about being effectively handcuffed to one’s laptop / phone. Mind you, these days it’s likely that you keep your phone with you anyhow, that’s not the point. It’s more the enforced nature of the context-switching, that context tension in the back of your head that you might have to deal with something — that’s the kicker.

Think back to the last conference-call you were on. No, not video-conference, or skype, I, literally, mean one of those things where you were on a good old-fashioned phone call for an hour or so.
Remember how drained you felt at the end of it?
Part of the reason for this is that old-school phone calls carry a very limited spectrum, and your brain is constantly working to “fill in the gaps”, and that is, simply put, exhausting. This happens even if you’re on speaker-phone (in fact, it might be even worse, since you have to devote some small percentage of your attention to the call).

And hence, back to being on-call — apart from all the other stuff that Cindy refers to (•) the neurological load of always being “on” is no different from being on a call (••).
There is no real solution here — it doesn’t matter how good your software, how informative your alerts, how automated your systems, in the end, that tension will exist. And that will cause more strain than not being on-call.

It does lead to one conclusion though — being on-call all the time will lead to burn-out in one form or the other, so be sure to distribute the load!

(•) Go read the whole article, it’s excellent!
(••) Hah, see what I did there? “on” “call”? I crack myself up