Volunteers, Not Conscripts: Fixing Out-of-Hours On-Call

Uptime matters, but so do your people. At Intercom, keeping our product working well at all times is critical to the success of our business. This means having people on-call around the clock. However, as we grew, we realised that we had ended up with an on-call setup that we weren’t proud of. We decided to solve these problems by creating a virtual team that would take over out-of-hours on-call work, consisting of volunteers, not conscripts, from across the engineering organisation. This talk goes into the process we applied, the positive impact to our on-call, and lessons learned.