There will be people, who will feel it is critical important to post some pictures at 3 am and they will get stressed, if it is not working (say people preparing an event and the pictures should be online the next day).
But .. whether that is worth that engineers must be on call, is a differnt question. I never had a job like this and I know I would never accept it as default for myself.
They can use a different platform, print the pictures on paper, there are a million ways to deal with these kind of issues.
An earthquake could strike and the event might need to be postponed.
If nobody's life or health is at risk, it is not urgent enough to sacrifice someone else's health for it.
I agree. But I think being on call is possible in a healthy way, if there are long enough brakes in between. Occasionally being a night on call is possible. (Well and normal if you have small kids, but having small kids and having to worry about getting an emergency call any minute, that would be draining)
not if they already committed to this one. you can't make such a change in a few minutes. limitations are so unusual that nobody would expect them and be prepared. and even if they were known ahead of time, you are also not expecting the kind of situation where you have to upload pictures in the middle of the night.
This isn't a 911 dispatching system.
sometimes i remember some important message i need to send colleagues or clients... for that i like the telegram feature where i can send a message with a delay. i can write it now and it will be sent the next morning or whenever i think is a good time. i wish my email client had that feature too.
That's way too big of a risk, and way too much stress to put on your customers.
For something like tax software, you should have people on call, or even 24/7 staffing, for that specific week. 2% of the year.
In general, big release dates or important deadline should often have extra resources. 0-10 days per year. Pay extra for the health hazard, but that doesn't mean don't do it.
In my country, the tax system (EDS, Electronic Declaration System) is down pretty much every single year on the day when tax declaration submissions start.
2020: "SRS: Significantly increasing EDS capacity is expensive and not cost-effective" https://www-lsm-lv.translate.goog/raksts/zinas/ekonomika/vid...
2022: "SRS urges not to rush to submit annual income tax returns so as not to overload the EDS" https://www-lsm-lv.translate.goog/raksts/zinas/ekonomika/vid...
2023: "The SRS urges not to rush to submit income tax returns in the first days of March" https://www-lsm-lv.translate.goog/raksts/zinas/ekonomika/vid...
2025: "A virtual queue will be open this year for submitting annual income tax returns to the SRS" https://www-lsm-lv.translate.goog/raksts/zinas/ekonomika/28....
So basically their "solution" for the longest time was to just tell people that it's too expensive to make it have high availability and that they shouldn't use the system on the first days of the period when you can submit the data and eventually just adding a queue in front of the system to manage the concurrent users.
It seems that taxes still get handled correctly and that nobody really cares that much. Found this to be an interesting example of going against the established culture of trying to go above and beyond for availability, even if I scoffed at it a few years ago.
It definitely wouldn't be horrible to live in a world where a prod outage doesn't mean "Sorry wife, I'm not coming home today, will be stuck in some random war room for hours and then fudge up the groceries massively due to sleep deprivation" but rather "Sorry boss, the system is down, what a bummer. I'll look into it tomorrow at 9 AM." for pretty much anything aside from truly critical and time sensitive systems (e.g. air traffic control, as opposed to your music streaming app).
And as I already said, when it comes to missing the tax deadline, leaving things broken would have a huge impact on the customers' heal and life. The total stress levels they'd feel would be enough to kill your server engineers outright.
The IRS can wait. If a million people can't file their taxes the IRS will wait and I'm okay with that.
I'm not risking another cardiac arrest so that a bunch of people can file their taxes on time.
Even if you're right, it would cause a fuckton of stress in the people filing taxes, many of them now undergoing a significantly higher risk of cardiac arrest than the guy who's on call 1 week per year.
And if there's even a few percent chance you're wrong, the fallout would be enormous. In both money lost and even more stress.
And how many people do you think it'll take to make the IRS wait? What if you're a bit under that threshold, still with a whole lot of very stressed customers?
As long as the amount of on-call time is very small, I don't think it needs to be restricted to a super critical subset of jobs.
Why should the engineers be stressed and overworked because other people are scared of something that doesn't have to happen?
The world is less stressful and - I think - better without manufactured urgency like what you're defending.
Don't get me wrong, some things are life and death, like life support machines. Taxes are not.
Despite not being anywhere near life or death, the stress is real. And for most people it's not crippling stress, but neither is being on call for a single week out of the year. If we're going to blow that level of on-call into a "risk of cardiac arrest" then to be reasonable we have to do the same thing for tax filing failures.
There's no way for deadlines to not be moderately stressful. You can't decide to avoid urgency and stress.
If you keep on creating examples where x number of people face consequences for being late, then yes, there will always be stressful consequences for being late.
Yes, there will always be situations like this, actual life or death situations. Don't release this update to address a newly spotted bug, pacemakers are all going to switch off at midnight and people die - worth the stress from the engineer and everyone else involved to keep people alive.
Is a tax return one of those things? It doesn't have to be. Unless you want to insist it has to be. That is my point.
> There's no way for deadlines to not be moderately stressful. You can't decide to avoid urgency and stress.
Owners of deadlines can decide to avoid urgency and stress if they have the resources to be flexible with submissions. Most deadlines are not life, death, urgency and stress, unless people make them to be.
And maybe also always-on humans, which some companies seem to ridiculously expect.
I really don't understand this obsession with 24/7 uptime for non-critical systems. Requiring your engineers to be always on-call and debug something at 3am is a health hazard and should be treated like one.
If a photo-sharing app is down at 3am, I'm sure the users can go to sleep and wait till 10am. This isn't some oxygen life support system. If you have that many users in multiple time zones, then hire people in multiple time zones.
Even if TurboTax crashes on 4/15 at 11:35pm and the engineers don't fix it until the next workday, resulting in millions of people not being able to file their taxes, I'm sure the IRS might grumble a lot but would give people an extension. It'll all be good, and everyone will get to sleep .