Mega2580.Solutions
September 2022

On-call burnout is a system design problem

By A. Tanaka · 4 min read

Every burned-out on-call rotation we've seen has the same root cause: too many low-value pages, for too long, until the person stops trusting their own alerts. The fix that actually works isn't wellness advice, it's deleting alerts.

We run a simple audit: for every alert that fired in the last month, did it lead to a real action? If not, it gets removed, downgraded to a dashboard-only signal, or rewritten with a threshold that means something. Most rotations we've audited cut their page volume by more than half without losing any real signal.

The team-level effect is bigger than the individual relief. A rotation that pages rarely, and only for things that matter, is one people trust — and trusted alerts get acted on faster, which is the entire point of having them.