What makes an on-call rotation healthy and sustainable for the engineers on it?

What the interviewer wants to hear

• Enough people in the rotation and a clear secondary or escalation path
• Low page volume with only actionable, urgent alerts paging
• Good runbooks and dashboards linked from alerts
• Proper handoffs and time off or pay after heavy shifts
• Review pages regularly and fix noisy alerts and recurring causes

Model answer

A healthy rotation has enough people that each person is on call only every few weeks, with a secondary and a clear escalation policy so nobody is alone. Page volume should be low, a common target is no more than a couple of incidents per shift, and every page must be urgent and actionable; everything else becomes a ticket. Each alert links to a runbook and a dashboard so the engineer knows what to do. At the start of each shift there is a short handoff about ongoing issues. After a heavy night people get time to recover, and on-call work is recognised or paid. Finally, the team reviews pages every week, deletes or tunes noisy alerts and fixes recurring causes. Without that loop alert fatigue and burnout grow.

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