I’ve never been on-call, but I’ve been on-call adjacent for a lot of my adult life—my partners, my housemates, my friends…they’ve largely been sysadmins, in Operations, or Dev/Ops, which means I’ve experienced a lot of the pain second-hand.
What do VHS players and Tamagotchis have in common with the pager? It’s simple, they’re old pieces of technology that were popular in the ‘90s. It’s no longer the “Saved by the Bell” years and doctors need to get with the times by ditching their hammer pants, fanny packs … and pagers! By saying goodbye to the pager, doctors can adopt a more secure, clinical communications solution that’s equipped to handle all 21st century hospital demands.
In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a group of scientist mice built a mega-computer named “Deep Thought” to Answer “The Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.” After 7.5 million years, the machine produced “42.” At PagerDuty, we did something similar, except we didn’t have scientist mice or wait 7.5 million years.
If you’ve ever been on call, you know that the incidents don’t stop because you have the flu. Or when you’re attending your child’s high school graduation. Or, as I found out firsthand, even when you’re at your own wedding. Confucius once said, “If you have never had a major occasion happen while you are on call, then you may not have ever lived.” (Okay, I totally made that one up.)
On-call compensation models may vary based on local laws, company culture, and management practices. Some common compensation models include: 1 - Incentivized on-call, 2 - Paid for scheduled overtime, 3 - Paid for total time spent resolving issues
The key to choosing the best compensation plan is finding a solution that works well for your company but also recognizes the employees for their effort and time spent. If employees are well-cared for, they will, in turn, care about the business and contribute to its’ success. After choosing a method and confirming it abides by local laws, be sure to examine the following to confirm that compensation is competitive and fair and that your team can adequately share the load on-call requires.
There are a number of reasons why email is predominately used to manage an incident. Everyone usually has access to email and the email technology has already been “paid for”. Therefore it’s easy to think of email as being a cheap resource that’s easy for MSPs to use. But easy isn’t always best…or even appropriate.
