I would respectfully say that you are wrong. I speak from experience. At Netflix we tried to hire for around the clock coverage. But what ended up working much better was taking that same team and having each person on call for a week at a time, all based in Pacific Time.
Yes, you would get calls at 2am, sometimes multiple days in a row. But you were only on call once every six to eight weeks, and we scheduled out well in advance so you could plan your life accordingly.
As a bonus, for the five weeks you weren't on call, you were highly incentivized (and had the time) to build tools or submit patches to fix the problems that woke you at 2am.
> It requires (oh, the horror!) actually maintaining production standards, runbooks, and other documentation.
I disagree with this too. Documentation and runbooks are useless in an outage. Instead of runbooks, write code to do the thing. Instead of documentation, comment the code and build automation to make the documentation unnecessary, or at least surface the right information automatically if you can't automate it.
Yes, you would get calls at 2am, sometimes multiple days in a row. But you were only on call once every six to eight weeks, and we scheduled out well in advance so you could plan your life accordingly.
As a bonus, for the five weeks you weren't on call, you were highly incentivized (and had the time) to build tools or submit patches to fix the problems that woke you at 2am.
> It requires (oh, the horror!) actually maintaining production standards, runbooks, and other documentation.
I disagree with this too. Documentation and runbooks are useless in an outage. Instead of runbooks, write code to do the thing. Instead of documentation, comment the code and build automation to make the documentation unnecessary, or at least surface the right information automatically if you can't automate it.