> At big companies, it should be possible to have enough engineering offices to staff oncall with normal 8 hour days. (8 hours in Tokyo, 8 hours in London, 8 hours in San Francisco, or similar.)
That arrangement is commonly known as "follow the sun support" (not particularly at you, it's just a good piece of jargon to know).
It comes with it's own set of issues. I work on a team that does follow the sun support, and while it's great for handling ops issues, it makes dev work much harder. We're not a large team, so it evens out to 2 people per region (one of which is always "on-call" and can't do dev work). The communication costs from time zones are real, and it makes everyone's context on what is going on different because they see updates from different regions.
> I remember it being something like $1600 per week, but I forget the exact number
No wonder, that's a pretty generous on-call stipend. I've worked places that paid for on-call, but never that well. It was usually more of a token amount, like $200 or $400 for the week. I.e. far less than it would be if you were paid your hourly wage (averaged from salary).
Overall, I think "follow the sun" is a great idea for teams that are generally not forward looking. It's hard to communicate on forward looking projects, but it's easy to hand over operational issues. I would absolutely do it for a NOC-type team, but I would have to think about doing it for a dev team that needs to handle after-hours issues.
That arrangement is commonly known as "follow the sun support" (not particularly at you, it's just a good piece of jargon to know).
It comes with it's own set of issues. I work on a team that does follow the sun support, and while it's great for handling ops issues, it makes dev work much harder. We're not a large team, so it evens out to 2 people per region (one of which is always "on-call" and can't do dev work). The communication costs from time zones are real, and it makes everyone's context on what is going on different because they see updates from different regions.
> I remember it being something like $1600 per week, but I forget the exact number
No wonder, that's a pretty generous on-call stipend. I've worked places that paid for on-call, but never that well. It was usually more of a token amount, like $200 or $400 for the week. I.e. far less than it would be if you were paid your hourly wage (averaged from salary).
Overall, I think "follow the sun" is a great idea for teams that are generally not forward looking. It's hard to communicate on forward looking projects, but it's easy to hand over operational issues. I would absolutely do it for a NOC-type team, but I would have to think about doing it for a dev team that needs to handle after-hours issues.