The life of an on-call engineer is surprisingly similar in startups and enterprises. As long as you answer your phone, you can be anywhere.

“Do you provide 24/7 support?” — “Of course we do!”

It’s one of these non-functional requirements that buyers of B2B SaaS products expect from all their suppliers—regardless of whether they are big tech or a small company like Yonder, the B2B SaaS company I co-founded.

So what do small companies do to cover that requirement?

Poor Man’s Solution: On-Call Support Duty

Small companies like us install an on-call support duty scheme, where people from the DevOps team take weekly shifts of responsibility to intervene in case a major malfunction occurs.

Then there is a tool called PagerDuty, which can take priority support calls from our customers and automated alerts from our infrastructure, routing them to the person on on-call duty — by email, text message, or phone call. Alerting options depend on the severity of the incident and on the time of the day or night.

When there is no incident, people work normally during the day, and they do whatever in the evening and on the weekends — provided they don’t drink alcohol, keep access to a computer, and don’t switch off their mobile phone at night. For their readiness, we pay them an additional allowance per day. Weekends and public holidays are paid better than normal weekdays.

So far, so simple. The system works great, and thanks to a range of technical solutions, interventions by our on-call support duty team are rare.

Surprising Fact 1: Some Big Corp Don’t Even Answer The Phone in Case of Problems

Now, how do big corporations handle 24/7 support?

At Yonder, we serve 30+ corporate and enterprise customers, and every now and then, there is a need to interact with the technical hotline due to a major problem.

Some of our customers choose to host our software on-premise or on their private cloud. Of course, this shifts some infrastructure responsibilities from us to the customer.

So far, so good.

For one of these customers, an SSL certificate expired late on Friday afternoon. Our PagerDuty tool alerted us, as the web client of our software wasn’t reachable anymore through an encrypted connection. As the customer itself operates 24/7, it was pretty clear that we needed to replace that expired SLL certificate as quickly as possible. As this customer uses its own domain, it was pretty clear that it would be the customer’s job to issue the new certificate.

We called the technical hotline. No answer, since it was already Friday late afternoon.

We called the front desk of the customer’s headquarters, with the intention to ask to put us through to somebody from the technical hotline team. No answer, since it was already Friday late afternoon.

Our team escalated to me, if I would have any higher-level contacts at the customer that could be reached.

I started calling people, and the first person I got on the phone was the CIO. His answer was clear and simple: “We’ll take care of this problem first thing on Monday morning.”

I was shocked and awed, but acknowledged that there wasn’t anything our team could do right now to fix the problem.

Surprising Fact 2: Big Corp Relies on On-Call Support Duty, Too

Maybe the example above is an outlier. Here is another one from one of our enterprise customers.

A few months ago, we performed a major upgrade on the authentication and authorization component of our software in the production environment. After weeks of testing and preparation, we still felt that something could go wrong with all those different authentication configurations our enterprise customers use. That’s why we advised all our customers to keep their technical hotline on alert, ready to assist in case of any problem.

As things seldom go smoothly with big IT migrations, we needed help from the customer’s technical hotline at 10 pm after the upgrade was completed. We called the technical hotline, with the engineer on duty calling responding swiftly.

Orchestra music in the background.

“Hey, can you please turn off the music in your background? We can hardly hear you.” — “Sorry, no I can’t, I’m in an orchestra rehearsal.”

The engineer on duty was on an on-call rotation like our engineers were. So we fixed the issues to the tunes of the orchestra, but the problem was fixed swiftly.

Conclusion

No matter if you’re working in startup or a big corporation, the organization of the technical support hotline is a leadership task.

Customers expect to reach your team around the clock in case of major problems, and you cannot afford that they can’t reach you unless they have the mobile phone number of your CIO.

But as long as you answer your phone swiftly — you can be anywhere during the on-call rotation.

Even in an orchestra rehearsal.