The on-call rotation nobody dreads
On-call quality is a reflection of engineering quality, not a separate problem.
A dreaded on-call rotation is usually a symptom, not the disease — it means the system pages for things that don't actually need a human, or that alerts don't come with enough context to act on quickly, or that the same root cause keeps recurring without ever getting fixed properly.
Every page should be actionable
An alert that fires but requires no action, or requires investigation just to determine whether action is needed, is training the on-call engineer to treat every page with suspicion instead of urgency. Every alert should come with enough context to act, or it shouldn't page a human at all.
Recurring pages are a backlog item, not a fact of life
If the same alert fires every few weeks with the same root cause, that's not bad luck — it's an unfixed bug that keeps interrupting someone's night. Recurring incidents deserve a real fix scheduled into the backlog, not a permanent tolerance for the interruption.
Rotation fairness matters more than heroics
A sustainable on-call system spreads load predictably and compensates the burden explicitly, rather than relying on the same one or two engineers who happen to be most willing to jump in. Reliability built on individual heroics doesn't survive that person leaving.
- Every alert that pages a human should be immediately actionable.
- Recurring incidents need a scheduled fix, not permanent tolerance.
- Sustainable on-call spreads load fairly instead of relying on a few people's willingness.
Dependency upgrades: doing them before they become emergencies
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