Being on call
On-call life can be very stressful. The stress comes from not knowing what is going to happen, plus not being able to work on the projects that you actually enjoy. To make it a better experience for those involved, the following are some tips and general policies for keeping everyone happy:
When deciding who to alert, do not alert everyone unless you have less than three people to alert. If you alert everyone, then you are alerting no one. I say less than three because with one or two people, in a rotation that has a primary and a secondary, you both are always on call anyway. You can do a rotation, but it might be just as easy to alert you both. Once you have three people, then one person can have time off.
Make sure there is an on-call schedule and people know when they are the on-call person. People should know how long they will be on call and when they next need to be on call. Usually, it helps to have the next three months of on call scheduled, so that people know if they...
