Depends on the service? I've maintained a service used for supply chain planning where an outage during business hours needed addressing, but an outage over a weekend or holiday wasn't important. Being able to set up company holidays ahead of time then just not think about it would have been a useful feature for an on-call tool in that scenario.

No, but you could, for example, allocate the holidays equally amongst the team, or as a special class of days with a different schedule like weekends.. rather than just screwing whoever happens to be on that week?

The fact that the product seems to have no concept of holidays when its essentially a scheduler++ is a problem.

The problem with doing trades which is the default easiest thing to do given the PagerDuty interface is that when you come back from (or just before you go on) vacation you typically end up with extra bonus on-call shift outside the cycle. Delightful!

All these things just sort of pile up into the "maybe its just easier not to take a couple days off" category, which is not really a mistake on your employers part.

Oh man, as the engineer who was more or less responsible for PD scheduling between 2013 - 2015, it really hurts to hear they still haven't solved this :/

> Do you shut down your service for Labor Day?

Depends on the service and industry. Banking adjacent companies are often allowed downtime off US business hours. Even at big tech companies I've run internal services that had business hours support only (nonproduction sandboxes, non-business-impacting services, long running job services with SLOs measured in hours or days)

> Depends on the service and industry. Banking adjacent companies are often allowed downtime off US business hours.

Honestly as a consumer this pisses me off. I get home for the day, relax, eat dinner, and log into the bank to check my finances at 8pm and east coast banks throw up a "scheduled downtime for upgrades" notice.

Some companies have international teams. National holiday awareness can be useful in that context.