Week 220: Mandatory
November 20, 2022
- Hello
- This week I’ve been thinking about mandatory on-call rotas. Lachie was asked to be on a mandatory on-call rota once, and he had to explain that “If you put me on an on-call rota, you also put my wife on an on-call rota because I have two kids, neither of whom are old enough to look after themselves for any significant length of time”. It’s one thing to say “you need to be within 15 minutes of your laptop and sober while on an on-call week” that is still a big ask, but when someone is a parent you have to add in “and you can’t look after your kids solo unless a backup childcare solution is less than 15 minutes away”. Let’s look at this in practice. My son has “mini-athletics” every Sunday. Well, he doesn’t actually because the sports hall roof blew off (lol brighton). On an on-call week I would have to take him to this, and my daughter would have to schlep along too. Anyway - this is why I fundamentally believeon-calls should either be properly compensated, or opt-in, or best efforts.
- I gave a talk at the Engine Room, the FT’s internal engineering conference. It was called “The Journey of a Byline” and it explored the various microservices that a byline travels through from being entered into our CMS all the way to being rendered by eg our website. It was a lot of fun to give and I managed to pull it back from 30 minutes of fact-shitting which is where it had gotten to at this point last week. I think probably I’ll shop it around some conferences, although I will have to remove a lot of FT in-jokes.
- I’ve got a week off this week. I’ll be doing DIY I expect. Maybe I’ll join mastodon. Maybe I’ll spice up my personal website.