The number of individuals who were on call was way more than I would expect for a company of intercom scale or size at the time. Also, the burden of work was distributed kind of pearly or unevenly across the different teams. And this led to some teams really just not taking on call as seriously in terms of like carrying their laptops around with them all weekend and knowing that they had to respond quickly to things. But other teams just knew they had to get on call and get online because if they didn't intercom was down. We wanted to have as intercom matured and grew, we wanted to have a more consistent experience, especially for customer facing features.
In this deep-dive episode, Brian Scanlan, Principal Systems Engineer at Intercom, describes how the company’s on-call process works. He explains how the process started and key changes they’ve made over the years, including a new volunteer model, changes to compensation, and more.
Discussion points:
- (1:28) How on-call started at Intercom
- (10:11) Brian’s background and interest in being on-call
- (14:06) Getting engineers motivated to be on-call
- (16:37) Challenges Intercom saw with on-call as it grew
- (19:53) Having too many people on-call
- (23:20) Having alarms that aren’t useful
- (26:03) Recognizing uneven workload with compensation
- (27:22) Initiating changes to the on-call process
- (30:08) Creating a volunteer model
- (33:02) Addressing concerns that volunteers wouldn’t take action on alarms
- (34:40) Equitability in a volunteer model
- (36:36) Expectations of expertise for being on-call
- (40:56) How volunteers sign up
- (44:15) The Incident Commander role
- (46:19) Using code review for changes to alarms
- (50:02) On-call compensation
- (52:50) Other approaches to compensating on-call
- (55:08) Whether other companies should compensate on-call
- (57:32) How Intercom’s on-call process compares to other companies
- (1:00:46) Recent changes to the on-call process
- (1:04:13) Balancing responsiveness and burnout
- (1:07:12) Signals for evaluating the on-call process
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