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I vividly remember a "small-hands" (smaller all-hands) very early in my career, where the VP basically said "we recognize that oncall is a burden, and we want to compensate you for it. At first we thought we should give you a bonus related to how many times you get paged - but then we realized that that's incentivizing you to build flaky systems. Then we considered giving a bonus in inverse relation to how often you're paged - but then we though, no, they're smart engineers, they'll just turn off the monitoring and collect the bonus. So we're giving you a flat rate".

In the absence of some untamperable objective way to measure service health (the concept of SLAs was a distant dream at that point), can't fault that reasoning, tbh!




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