If you are on call and you receive a call at say 3:45 am and you resolve the issue by 4:30 am. Is it then worth trying to go back to sleep to wake up for work the next day or should you just stay awake and power through it?
I’m asking because this happened to me and I went back to bed, did not feel tired at all and when I eventually fell asleep I got maybe an hour of extra sleep and I felt like complete garbage when my alarm went off and pretty much like that for the remainder of the day. Whereas I feel like if I just stayed awake for the extra time after 4:30 am I might have not felt as bad?
What are your opinions on this?
Edit: I’m appreciating all the responses and taking the information in. Sounds like this is not a clear cut case that is a simple yes do this or no don’t do that.
I tell my engineers - if you get paged off hours, however much time you spend resolving the issue, take that time back from the next workday.
I also practice what I preach - if I get paged at 3am and work on the issue until 5am, I’ll come in 2 hours late or leave 2 hours early.
This is how we do it here as well but I find the lack of sleep even if I went home an hour or two earlier impacts the entirety of the workday.
It sounds like you’ve got a good manager, so hopefully they won’t hold that against you. This is the reality of oncall - it sucks!
When you get woken up in the middle of the night, of course you’re going to be more tired the next day. I’m the same as you - I can’t fall back asleep if its early morning so I normally just stay awake and am tired that day. You shouldn’t feel guilty for being at 1/2 capacity after working all night to solve your employer’s problems!
Yeah my manager is sympathetic to it because they also have to do on call on the roster. So they know the pain of getting up at those hours of the morning. I think based on the information in this thread I have a good strategy for this.
My contract says that I must get 8 hours clear.
If I get a call at 345, and resolve it at 0430, you will NOT see me before 1230. You will pay me from 0800-1700 but you will not see me tomorrow until lunch.
Name the thing that is so important I must work on it in the morning while sleep-impaired.
The thing you supposedly solved at 4:30
Nah. I wouldn’t solve it; I’d resolve it. :-)
Usually a junior will pick up the problem ticket in the morning, and collab with a senior if it’s a non-trivial fix. Soon as the workaround’s in and the incident can close, the overnight nerd is back to bed and the 8 hours timer starts.
Unions and ITIL are the light and the way.
Name the thing that is so important I must work on it in the morning while sleep-impaired.
The domain controllers aren’t going to apply untested upstream alpha changes to themselves! And tomorrow is Friday, so it’s perfect!
I hate with a passion whoever you work for. I don’t know you, I don’t know them but I have a dislike for them that rivals the heat of the sun in the south on a day in mid July.
Thankfully I was channeling a former employer. I’m glad to be rid of that culture.
We built an automated pipeline, so yeah they will.
Ack! You made me spit my tea, laughing. That’s perfect.
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I mean, its different for everyone.
For me I’ve done plenty of shifts where I got paged, slept or didn’t sleep and then worked a full day.
But at this point, if I go back to sleep, I won’t set an alarm, because I see no value in going to work like a zombie. If I end up at work but can’t focus because I was upnall night with he pager, I’ll just hit my couple meetings and call it. No point in sitting around pretending to work.
You’re giving up your sleep, and by extension your health, to make someone else richer.
You should be pushing that you get the entire day off. And when your manager denies it, and they will because this doesn’t sound like a one-off emergency, insist that you need to call them and wake them up each and every time. If it truly is an emergency, they will be glad that you are keeping them in the loop. When it’s not (and it almost never is), they need to champion your need to make it stop.
Everyone involved needs to feel the pain for the harm they are causing.
I’ve been 24x7 on call since the '90s. The only time I haven’t been on call in that whole range is when I’m on a plane or I’m somewhere that has no service. I’ve replaced a bank of data servers from a campground, I fixed crippling production problems from an airplane.
Unfortunately the answer to your question relies mainly on your personal ability to fall asleep. And your ability to stay asleep.
From the time where you’re actually under you need about 45 minutes to do any good sleep cycle wise. If you don’t make it to REM it does you no good mentally. Making it an hour and a half is my personal minimum optimal. It should always be somewhere around a multiple of 45 minutes, obviously it gets front padded by how long it takes you to fall asleep.
I’ll take an hour and a half over nothing. I can sleep in full daylight, I can sleep during thunderstorms tornadoes incredible amounts of sound around no problem.
Depending on the status of whatever I dealt with at night, I’ll either take the rest of my time in the morning or at night. Usually if I was up till 4:00 fixing something I need to be up at 9:00 when people start coming in to make sure it’s okay. I’ll either take a few hours at lunch or cut off early for the day. I don’t mind missing a few hours of sleep here and there but if it drags on for more than a couple of days I eventually have to pay the piper.
I do have another really weird sleep thing though. If it’s late and I’m driving and I’m starting to doze. If I pull over somewhere and sleep for 15 minutes, when the alarm goes off I no longer have the uncontrollable urge to doze off. It doesn’t do anything for my mental acuity. It doesn’t make me feel rested. It just clears that insatiable need to close my eyes and shut down, at least for a few more hours.
I was going to say the same about the 15 minute doze while driving, but add that the same works at work for me. There will
Be times when I am reading the same paragraph 4 times and I will know it is time for me to book a meeting room for 30 minutes.Lie on the floor, set an alarm for 15 minutes, out like a light. Very restorative.
Sorry to say I don’t have any good answers about this. When midnight on-call calls became a fairly regular occurrence for me, I quit my job to go somewhere it wouldn’t be any significant issue.
But if it helps, I’ve always gone back to bed after a call and laid there trying to fall asleep until either I fell asleep and got a little bit of extra sleep or my alarm went off and I had to work. I always felt like crap when I did, but I doubt I’d have felt any less bad had I stayed up instead. My theory was that even if staying up might be preferable at the time, going back to bed, even if I only got an hour of sleep, would be better for me (at least in terms of not shortening my lifespan as much) in the long run.
(Full disclosure, I’m a coder, not a sysadmin, but they were taking DevOps pretty seriously, so I was on call for the applications my team maintained.)
Mmm I guess it’s a give and take scenario with the lifespan analogy. I think I feel more useless to the business as I sit there feeling ever so much more tired throughout the workday and the struggle to focus increases throughout the day. Thanks for the input!
I didn’t intend for the “lifespan” bit to be an analogy. I meant that sleep deprivation will literally shorten one’s life. Especially if it’s a frequent occurrence. When it comes to things like 3:00am calls, I’ll prioritize my health over my usefulness to the business any day.
If it’s within an hour and a half of my alarm I will get up and just start the day. I find that I can get a lot done before my colleagues start coming in.
This is an interesting way of doing it. The added bonus would be nil traffic on the way into work and an early (but on time) finish. Thanks for this perspective.
A fifteen minute nap may help you get some rest. If you have trouble falling asleep fast, you can use binaural beats if it helps. Sometimes I lay down for a 15 and only end up getting 5 min of actual unconsciousness but it makes a world of difference when you have to clock back in less than 2 hours.
Lots of good replies here so I won’t retread.
I will add that, as a manager, when my team had on-call, I did not mind if my team member wanted to “work” the next day to min/max their compensation; but I sure as hell made sure they didn’t have any production access if they report in sleep deprived.
