On-call mental wellness?
A few people left our team so the on-call rotation has become more intense for me personally. Its just 9-5 pm but have two weeklong rotations in one month span. It actually requires work and investigation (not just carrying your phone and hitting ACK) and following up with persons who can be impatient. Maybe I'm a bit slow-- but if you don't answer within 15 min you get a DM. Its usually a sleep-deprived, over-caffeinated week. ChatGpt, Gemini, CoPilot use all the AI assistants -- still can be very tedious and repetitive. And coworkers can get rather impatient, demanding, or frustrated even when you try the best of your ability. I didn't have many tickets to work on I didn't mind but its not very fun. I constantly have my eye on the clock. And yes try to exercise and sleep regularly. I don't have a right to complain really since there are no 3 am pages. But if you miss a page or there is DT at 9:30 am before you settle in to start your day -- you will get called out. Really its one of those times you want the week to be over, and sometimes you just look forward to sleep. We brought two new people in and 3/4 months in they have not participated in on-call. Its not glamorous work at all so I'm guessing senior (read: OLD) engineers look down on it. I told my boss about it (that frequency of twice in a month is too much) and the new hires should participate, his main priority is hiring other people which is tough finding people. One co-worker seems rather self-centered and not a team-player at all and came with some lame excuse not to do it while being the secondary. Usually I've seen on-call rotations be given to the desperate or lower rank ICs but here even our staff engineers do it. So thats why I'm a bit frustrated that its a bit unfair ( deeper systemic issues with transparency that I dont want to get into).
This is exactly why SWE is not a desirable profession. Oncall is awful. I’ve had pages at 2am, pages on Christmas, etc all for non trivial issues that required hours and hours of work. OP I sympathize with you but you should be playing hardball here. Imagine if you leave there will be a 1 man oncall then?? You are not being paid extra for being on 24/7 support for half the month, you’re effectively working 426 hours a month instead of 160. I would be firm that a less than 4 person oncall rotation is unacceptable, even 4 is pushing it.
You should be happy it’s not overnight. Being woken up at 3am to fix issues ruins my week completely. And we have less than 15 minutes to answer or else it goes to backup and we get reprimanded. Those new people will get put in the rotation in a few months (at Microsoft it’s usually at 6 month mark, they have to make sure they can handle it)