Effective On-Call Rotations: Lessons From Building Fair Schedules

The Rotation Nobody Wants Our on-call rotation was a spreadsheet. Updated manually. Someone always got scheduled during their vacation. Two people occasionally got double-booked. Holidays were a battleground. Designing Fair Rotations Principle 1: Equal Burden Distribution Track total on-call hours, not just shift count: def calculate_oncall_burden ( engineer , period_days = 90 ): shifts = get_shifts ( engineer , period_days ) return { ' total_hours ' : sum ( s . duration_hours for s in shifts ),