On-Call and First Responder: One Rotation to Rule Them All

On-call is a requirement for at least some engineers in all SaaS companies. At least some of your customers will not have identical working hours to you. If your software fails to deliver what it needs to in that non-overlapping time, someone needs to fix it. If you’re on-call for a week: you may be less productive and more of a blocker for feature work. Combine this with a first responder rotation to also focus standard working hours on normally shared team non-roadmap work. 📚 History Before I worked at GitHub, I was used to having teams of “ops (engineers)” and teams of “(application) engineers”. Ops teams were/are sometimes (perhaps wrongly) called other things: sysadmins, infrastructure, devops, SREs etc. Essentially this split software delivery into two parts: the people that build the software (and are not on-call) the people that are responsible for making sure the software gets delivered (and are on-call) If you are still in the wonderful (or terrible, depending) situation…

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