Don't follow the sun.

When I speak with engineering leaders, I sometimes get asked to endorse an underway plan to spin up a “follow the sun” on-call rotation. Instead of one team taking pages for the full day, they'll split the load into 2 twelve hour shifts or 3 eight hour shifts.

My advice is not what folks anticipate: please don’t.

"Follow the sun" model is an evolutionary dead end for engineering on-call rotations. Having run the “follow the sun” on-call rotation for several years at Uber, I’ve come to believe...