on-call-management
On-Call Management
On-call is usually designed around the system's needs — coverage, escalation, response time — and rarely around the human needs of the person holding the pager. That asymmetry is why on-call burns people out: the system gets 24/7 coverage and the human gets disrupted sleep, anxiety about the phone, and no formal accounting for any of it. A sustainable on-call program treats the person's wellbeing as a first-class design constraint, not a cost the rotation silently absorbs.
The signal that on-call is broken is rarely a missed SLA — it's an engineer quietly dreading their week, or the best people avoiding teams with bad rotations. That signal shows up as attrition and burnout long before it shows up in an incident report.
Treat on-call health as a reliability metric, not a personal cost the rotation absorbs silently.