“On-Call Is Ruining My Life” and Other Tales about Holding the Pager as an SRE
summary
A 65‑question survey of largely 500+ org engineers with ~18 years’ experience finds 87% unhappy with on‑call status quo and 74% experiencing overload or burnout; average rotation size is five to ten people and 34% still do feature work while paged. Concrete failures include missing handoffs (28% never get one), lack of permissions to change alerts, and no measurement of paging impact. Recommendations include 65‑question survey validated findings, 74% experienced overload as a baseline metric, and simple fixes like allocate an hour weekly for alert tuning, verbal handoffs, tracking wake‑ups, and measuring on‑call burden.
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chapters (7)
- 0:00Introduction and context
- 3:02Research findings overview
- 5:59The no good nine challenges
- 12:20Workload and burnout
- 19:44Impact on organizations
- 25:31Recommendations for change
- 32:20Next steps and closing
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