Engineering Enablement by Abi Noda cover image

Intercom’s approach to a great on-call experience | Brian Scanlan (Intercom)

Engineering Enablement by Abi Noda

How Spotify's Intercom Squad Model Has Changed Over the Years

4min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

I want to ask you since sort of evangelizing this and writing about it and doing podcast guest appearances like this one what's changed more recently. I know one thing you brought up was that you'd recently spun up an on call process for your security team love to hear more about that and any other more recent changes you guys have made. Well your advice to listeners to not blindly copy and paste but to understand the principles behind intercom implemented sounds reminds me of a conversation I just had on this podcast with someone who had worked at Spotify and he came on to talk about how so many companies copied and pasted the Spotify squad model and similarly ran into a lot of challenges with that.

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

‍

Mentions and links:

Follow Brian on LinkedIn or Twitter
Brian’s article: How we fixed our on call process to avoid engineer burnout
Gergely Orosz’s On-Call Compensation

Get the Snipd
podcast app

Unlock the knowledge in podcasts with the podcast player of the future.

App store banner

Play store banner

AI-powered
podcast player

Listen to all your favourite podcasts with AI-powered features

Discover
highlights

Listen to the best highlights from the podcasts you love and dive into the full episode

Save any
moment

Hear something you like? Tap your headphones to save it with AI-generated key takeaways

Share
& Export

Send highlights to Twitter, WhatsApp or export them to Notion, Readwise & more

AI-powered
podcast player

Listen to all your favourite podcasts with AI-powered features

Discover
highlights

Listen to the best highlights from the podcasts you love and dive into the full episode