In the past it used to be that they somebody would just ping me on slack and I'd kind of add them to the list. We changed that up over time to have like a more self-serve process where a wrote up materials and provided away from people. People can go through a little bit of a curriculum at their own pace we never had a too much of like a shadowing system or ran too many game days but honestly giving people the opportunity to to go fully on call when they're comfortable has largely worked out well for us.
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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