Uncovering the mysteries of on-call

A survey was conducted to understand how organizations structure and compensate their on-call teams. The study included responses from over 200 companies, including tech giants like Google, Amazon, and Airbnb. Key findings include that in 70% of the organizations, each team is responsible for its own on-call rota rather than having a centralized on-call team. Over 40% of participants were not compensated for being on-call, with this trend more common in larger organizations. The most commonly cited challenges faced by on-callers include disrupted personal life, dealing with issues without sufficient context or knowledge, lack of sleep, and false alerts. To address the issue of accurately calculating time spent on-call, a new on-call compensation calculator has been launched that can automatically generate reports detailing how much each team member is owed based on their hours spent holding the pager.