Incident Management Practical By Samson Tanimawo, PhD Published Apr 6, 2026 4 min read

On-Call Paging Policy Fairness

Some teams page more than others. Fairness in the policy.

Distribution

Track pages per engineer per quarter. Should be roughly equal.

Outliers: investigate. Some get more pages because of service criticality.

Engineers rotate through services. Not always the same person on the noisy service.

Rotation also spreads expertise.

On-call pay or time-off. Compensates for the load.

Without it, engineers leave. With it, on-call is sustainable.