I saw a tweet by Charity Majors that got me thinking–

Yes, yes. On call sucks and can destroy your life. I know this. Bored now.

On call is a fact of life for anyone who cares about developing high quality software for the long run. So how can we make it not suck?

— Charity Majors (@mipsytipsy) January 31, 2018

On-call is stressful, overwhelmingly the negative type of stress, distress, rather than positive, eustress. I’ve written about the stresses of on-call before–urgency, uncertainty, duration, and expectations.  We all know that distress can contribute to burnout, but individually those four factors are fairly benign. Expectations are part of any job. People on oil rigs work 12+ hours a day for two weeks straight. A number of jobs have uncertain and urgent of tasks, such as first responders or doctors. If these components can be managed, why then can on-call be so miserable?

Digging deeper, I came to the conclusion that the worst part of on-call revolves around frequency and volume. Everything we do around improving on-call I believe tries to attack these two causes. Why do these factors impact on-call, and how can they be mitigated?

Being on-call is stressful. It feels like the future of the company–or at the very least your job–depends on your vigilance. When will the pager alert come? How bad will it be? Where is this stress coming from? Urgency - Typically on-call only has a certain amount of time to respond to an incident. The idea of being late to respond is stressful for many. There’s also an implied urgency in that down = bad, so services should be restored as quickly as possible