Human Load Balancing– creative strategies for managing on-call

Abstract:

I’ll present a taxonomy of both standard and totally non-standard ways companies have organized their on-call schedules and escalation policies to make sure incidents get handled quickly, work gets distributed fairly, and pain is minimized.

Details: - How people set up schedules (and why): Weekly vs daily vs odd-length rotations - Constructing primary/secondary/tertiary backup layers - Race-to-the-pager, round-robin, and availability-driven response - Multi-tiered support and NOC use cases

Why me? Why this talk?

The message of "DevOps" as empathy continues to sweep the community, but I worry that we sometimes practice empathy when it's easy. Real empathy means being empathetic even in trying or conflict-ful situations, and even when those we're trying to work with are very different than ourselves.

As a product manager, a support specialist, ...., I've managed heavy interpersonal conflict across work, departmental, and class and race lines, and developed strong skills in defusing hot situations and helping different parties come to understand and see each others' perspective. I'm passionate about helping operations, developers, and every other department in a company realize that everybody is on the same team, working toward a common good. Speaker: Speaker 32