Bad Machinery— Managing Interrupts Under Load

Lots of thought is given to how to organise oncall rotations — around people's schedules, around periods of critical coverage, and with fairness in mind. Less thought is given to the human aspect of oncall —how it affects people's ability to get other work done, their general cognitive flow state, and burnout rates. This talk will present a paper used internally in several SRE teams at Google to organise rotations around people, bearing in mind that people are not machines.

Dave O'Connor is a Senior Site Reliability Manager at Google. He has been at Google for almost 11 years, 9 of which were spent oncall, and organising oncall rotations. He has spent time on several teams in Google SRE, and currently manages the teams that run Google's storage in their Dublin, Ireland office. His specialty is being spectacularly grumpy at being interrupted, both for himself and on people's behalf; he has spent many years building teams that handle heavy interrupt load without everyone hating their lives.