Reducing On-Call Engineer Burnout with a Volunteer Management Infrastructure - DevOps 121

Adventures in DevOps

Managing uptime is critical for customers and it can be a powerful customer activity that connects engineers to the value that customers receive from your product, however it can also be a heavy source of burnout for engineers. Brian Scanlan with Intercom has created a volunteer management infrastructure that increases the efficiencies of on-call engineers while also reducing the inherent disruptive nature to the job. Today on the show, the panel interviews Brian about his process and architecture to this on-call management infrastructure.
In this episode…

1. The on-call burden
2. Alarm management
3. Escalation paths
4. Incentives for the volunteer teams
5. Deployment processes
6. Improving standards and expectations
7. Human centric vs. machine centric