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Handling Crises with a team

We are data startup around cloud/big data. Most of our technical employees are currently working remote (Romania). The problem is that from time to time (every 3 months or so) we are experiencing downtimes because of technical issues.

How do you handle crisis situations in your teams when they fall on a weekend or public holidays ? In our case people do respond but often very late and it always gives me the feeling they believe they are doing the company a favor. This weekend it was only me and the server admin and later another guy joined via chat from his phone.

In general we try to be a very flexible company so that we approve holidays short term (as in tomorrow) or we allow people to take a break during the day to go to the post office etc.

How are other companies handling these situations on weekends ? Is the whole tech team available in case of downtime ? Do you have standby rotations for developers ? Are we too nice with employees or is this simply employee bebavior vs. founder?

 

  • Have team members on call and pay them to do so.

    Have rollback capability in place.

    I’m sure there are more.

    Reply

  • Yes, they are doing you a favor. If you give them benefits, it is not a trade for their weekends.

    As a tech co-founder, I lived on call for at least one year, before we’re able to have an “on call schedule”.

    If something broke, I had to personally fix it. This made me take better decisions during working hours. Bad code is not acceptable, tech debit is critical. Increased test coverage, improved infrastructure, etc.

    Now, I have someone else on call, but they are called only if something really critical happens, like “AWS is down!!”. Most of the time, we have documented what changed between deploys and a non-tech person is able to click some buttons and go back to a working version.

    Reply
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