With 3 people you can have a "follow the sun" rotation during business hours which takes care of the entire week, and I don't think you would need 7 more people for the weekend.

We manage it with 3 sysop/sysadmins. I think you vastly overestimate how many people you need to keep a 20 minute SLA.

That’s a shitty life.

I find it rather insulting that you think it must be a shitty job.

Expectation of 24/7, 20 minute response to a callout is bullshit. If that’s not shitty, you’re a victim of some sort of employee Stockholm syndrome.

Not all 3 have to respond all the time. It's a rotating schedule for having the overnight phone and the weekend phone (during weekend nights the SLA is relaxed to 1 hour).

And keep in mind, 20 minute response doesn't mean you fix the problem in 20 minutes, it means you respond in 20 minutes to the callout.

I think you're victim of an easy-going startup culture.

I misread it.

I’ve been oncall for escalations for like 15 years. That’s miserable enough, IMO frontline guys need fixed schedules and rotation if the volume is high.

I definitely cast my perspective on this and apologize if I came on too strong,

Sorry to say, you're right and he has Stockholm syndrome. It's a very aggressive schedule, must be missing holidays half of the time to keep the phone.