Prioritizing Work and On-call Support

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Josh Pigford
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Full transcript:
Ben:
And today we don't have Starr, because Starr is on vacation this week, fireside chat.

Josh:
I will be on vacation next week, and the week after.

Ben:
Nice.

Josh:
I don't know if you saw, I extended my vacation.

Ben:
I didn't see this.

Josh:
Yeah. So, surprise!

Ben:
Two weeks back to back. That's a record.

Josh:
Yeah. I decided I'm feeling it and I don't think a week is going to be enough. So just thought I'd go for it.

Ben:
Yeah, I get that. I get that. It's funny, I was looking... We started this vacation calendar, recently, since we are looking at transitioning away from Basecamp, where our vacation calendar was, we are now putting a vacation calendar in Google calendar, because we use G Suite for all of our stuff. And I set up this vacation calendar, and I noticed that Starr put one on there, and then Josh put on a vacation and then Kevin put on a vacation. And then, Ben Findley, just week after week after week, it's like everybody's taking a vacation. I was like, all right, so I put myself on vacation.

Josh:
Yeah, you got to put yourself in there. Yeah.

Ben:
I did. Yeah. I added myself yesterday, for the week after Ben Findley's vacation.

Josh:
I don't know if you went and... I went in and just put a bunch of vacations for the rest of the year for-

Ben:
I saw that.

Josh:
... myself. Yeah.

Ben:
That's awesome.

Josh:
I mean, they might change, but I figured, if I at least put them in there, that'll force me to think about it and decide. Because that's been an ongoing problem, I always wait too long and then, finally, take the vacation when I just desperately need it, and I want to avoid that cycle, like we're supposed to be. This is supposed to be sustainable.

Ben:
This is a calm company. It means, lots of vacations.

Josh:
Yeah. We should be calm if we're running a calm company.

Ben:
I like that idea of putting on these dates tentatively and just planning on it. I might try that.

Josh:
Yeah. You should just plan them out. Also, yeah, I put our traditionally long winter vacation on there too, which I think is currently the last two weeks of December and the first week of January, which we can always move that around or sometimes we do the Hack week or whatever.

Ben:
Yeah. I've come to cherish that tradition. I like having that-

Josh:
It's nice.

Ben:
Knowing that's going to be downtime. You know?

Josh:
Yeah.

Ben:
I mean-

Josh:
I like the first week of the year off is kind of... there's something about that, where you don't have to go back to work the day after New Year's or whatever. That feels really nice.

Ben:
I mean, in reality, we're still on call. So if something broke, were going to work, but, yeah, it is nice not having that expectation of showing up and doing actual productive stuff.

Josh:
Yeah. Yeah. It's the low bandwidth mode.

Ben:
Yeah. It's also this past winter when we did that, I used that to just experiment with some stuff, work-related stuff like Elasticsearch and whatever, so that's kind of fun. It's a tinkering... even if we don't do an official Hack Week, it's still a good time to do some tinkering and get some of those creative juices going.

Josh:
Read some books on computer science or something like that, get excited about it again.

Ben:
Well, going through the SOC 2 compliance thing, the type two for the first time audit, one of the things that I came across that was new was this continuing education tracking thing. So the auditor wants evidence that we're actually doing continuing education for our employees. We always do conferences and stuff, but 2020 was a bad year for conferences, and we've never really tracked continuing education. We just like, "Yeah, let's do this conference," or whatever, and it's kind of ad hoc. And now it's like, "Oh, we need to track this, it's a good idea to plan something." So yeah, digging out those old computer science books or taking a course or doing a conference. Got to do it.

Josh:
Which is, well, you got to do it, but it's also, to me, that's one of my favorite things to do. I really like learning, so even in my spare time, that's what I like to do.

Ben:
Same.

Josh:
So I realized even with, yeah, my perfect workweek is a couple of hours maximum a day of doing the day-to-day things that you have to do, and then spend the rest of the day reading or learning something or working on improving your skills.

Ben:
Yep. Yeah. I to-

Josh:
That's what makes me happy.

Ben:
I don't try to do that every day, I like the idea, but I try to do that on Fridays. Friday to me is like the decompression day, I'm cruising into the weekend now. And so I try to put aside all the normal stuff and just something kind of interesting. Before we got on this morning, I was playing with some Docker stuff, not that we use Docker, but maybe we will someday, and just fiddling with it. You know?

Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Ben:
I think it's kind of fun.

Josh:
Yeah. Yeah. I like that.

Ben:
Until we get one of those customer requests that come in, I'm like, "Oh, I have to do some actual work now." And so, love our customers, but sometimes they can be kind of inconvenient, legitimate complaints about things need to be fixed.

Josh:
Or when there's an ops emergency, and so I drop everything and fix it. You had some of that going on this week. I know.

Ben:
But with both you and Starr got to experience those ops emergencies. It was actually a funny, so Starr, is on vacation, but the Starr was still on call for part of that time.

Josh:
The first night. Yeah. Because she had scheduled me to take over, was it yesterday? Whatever day it was-

Ben:
But in the morning.

Josh:
... but it was the night before. Yeah. It was like-

Ben:
Yeah, so I imagine in the future she might schedule you to swap a bit earlier, but-

Josh:
Yeah. I feel bad, because she said that, I guess, they had to get up early for a road trip and it's like 2:00 AM or something, or actually it was like 4:00 AM, I think, by the time the alerts died down.

Ben:
Yeah. The bad part was that there wasn't really anything to do. There was this spike in memory usage on our Redis Cluster, but it resolved itself, but only after sending some alerts saying, "Hey, somebody better pay attention to this," because that's a critical part of our infrastructure.

Josh:
Well, I mean, that's happened to me a few times. I mean, that's usually my on-call experience to be honest, and if it's worse than that, there's a good chance I'm waking you up anyways. But I mean, that's part of... You have a system well-architected, at least to the point, where if there is something, it does usually resolve itself, but still you need someone to sit up with it and babysit it until it does, just to make sure. And I mean, it would be totally unfair that you're the one who builds the system and also has to babysit it all the time, so our on call schedule is like a babysitter rotation.

Ben:
Yeah. Yeah. It's funny that you mentioned that, because I was looking at this vacation schedule, it's like, "Oh, when should I take vacation?" So I went and looked at the PagerDuty rotation to try and schedule my vacation away from my rotation on PagerDuty, so I didn't have to swap. And...