Reducing On-Call Engineer Burnout

Introduction

A 2025 industry survey found that 22 percent of engineering leaders and developers face critical levels of burnout, with another 24 percent experiencing moderate burnout. On-call responsibilities amplify this problem significantly. Engineers who carry pagers report anxiety even when not actively responding to incidents, disrupted sleep patterns from overnight alerts, and mounting stress from the constant threat of interruption.

The impact extends beyond individual well-being. Burned-out engineers make more mistakes during critical incidents, take longer to resolve issues, and eventually leave organizations entirely. This creates a vicious cycle where remaining team members shoulder increased on-call burden, accelerating burnout across the team.

Burnout isn’t inevitable. Organizations that implement evidence-based strategies maintain operational reliability while keeping engineers healthy, engaged, and effective. This guide covers practical approaches to reduce on-call burnout through rotation design, alert quality, automation, workload management, and organizational support.

Design Fair On-Call Rotations

Poor rotation design causes burnout faster than almost any other factor. When a few engineers carry disproportionate on-call burden, exhaustion becomes inevitable.

Expand Team Size

Target one week per month maximum for each engineer in continuous coverage rotations. This rhythm allows proper recovery between on-call periods while maintaining system knowledge.

Small teams requiring more frequent rotation signal capacity problems demanding attention, not acceptance. If you need engineers on call every other week, you don’t have a sustainable model—you have an imminent attrition problem.

For business-hours-only coverage, minimum three engineers provide reasonable rotation frequency. For 24/7 coverage, four to five engineers minimum enables monthly rotation. Organizations requiring more frequent shifts should prioritize hiring or reducing scope.

Use Weekly Rotations

Weekly rotations provide predictable schedules that allow engineers to plan personal commitments. They offer sufficient time to develop context without the fatigue of extended periods while preventing the constant disruption of daily handoffs.

Longer rotations concentrate stress. Shorter rotations prevent engineers from ever mentally disconnecting from on-call responsibility. Weekly strikes the balance for most teams.

Implement Follow-the-Sun Coverage

Global teams can eliminate night shifts entirely through follow-the-sun coverage, where regional teams hand off responsibility at the start of their workday. Asia-Pacific handles their business hours, hands to Europe, who hands to Americas.

Sleep quality directly impacts memory, problem-solving, and productivity. Follow-the-sun coverage preserves these cognitive functions while maintaining continuous operational coverage. The coordination overhead of handoffs proves worthwhile compared to the cumulative cognitive and health costs of perpetual night shifts.

Honor Time Off

Systems that ignore personal commitments create resentment and drive attrition. Build comprehensive exclusion mechanisms into your scheduling:

Holiday exclusions: Roster-wide blocks that prevent shift generation on official company holidays and planned maintenance windows. Nobody should receive alerts during organization-wide holidays.

Individual time off: User-specific exclusions that automatically advance rotation to the next available person during vacations and personal leave. Require vacation time to be completely off-call—half-measures don’t provide recovery.

Flexible swaps: Enable engineers to trade shifts without manager intervention. Support override systems where team members temporarily substitute into schedules for personal circumstances.

Separate Development and On-Call Duties

Engineers assigned both development work and on-call duty experience constant context switching that degrades both responsibilities. Development requires focused blocks of uninterrupted time. On-call demands immediate attention to alerts.

Attempting both simultaneously results in fragmented development work, increased stress, and lower quality incident response. When engineers are on call, reduce their development expectations accordingly. Some organizations designate on-call weeks as “interrupt-driven work” periods focused on operational improvements rather than feature development.

Improve Alert Quality

Alert quality directly determines on-call experience. Excessive low-quality alerts create the grinding stress that leads to burnout.

Reduce False Positives Aggressively

False positive alerts—notifications that trigger for non-problems—train engineers to ignore alerts, creating dangerous complacency. Worse, they fragment sleep and attention without providing value.

Implement a zero-tolerance policy for false positives. When an alert fires incorrectly, treat it as a production incident requiring immediate resolution. Either fix the threshold, improve the detection logic, or delete the alert entirely.

Track false positive rates per alert type. Anything above 5 percent false positives needs immediate remediation. Aim for zero.

Configure Alerts Based on Impact

Only alert on conditions that require immediate human intervention. If an issue can wait until business hours, don’t page someone at 3 AM. Configure severity levels that match business impact:

Critical alerts: Customer-facing outages, data loss risk, security incidents. Page immediately regardless of time.

High-urgency alerts: Degraded service, partial outages, resource exhaustion trending toward critical. Page during extended hours but consider business-hours-only for some.

Low-urgency alerts: Warning conditions, approaching thresholds, informational trends. Never page—send to channels monitored during business hours only.

Implement Intelligent Grouping

Multiple alerts firing for the same underlying issue create notification storms that overwhelm on-call engineers. When a database fails, ten different services may alert about connection errors simultaneously.

Smart alert grouping clusters related notifications, presenting engineers with the actual problem rather than every symptom. This reduces cognitive load and helps engineers focus on root causes instead of drowning in cascading alerts.

Use Grace Periods

Transient issues resolve themselves within minutes. Alerting immediately on brief anomalies creates unnecessary interruptions for problems that self-heal.

Configure grace periods before firing alerts. If a service check fails once but succeeds on retry within 30 seconds, don’t wake anyone. If it stays down for a sustained period, then alert. This filters out network blips and service restarts without delaying notification of actual problems.

Automate Repetitive Response Tasks

The 2025 burnout research identified repetitive response tasks as the biggest cause of fatigue among incident responders. Automation directly addresses this primary burnout driver.

Create Executable Runbooks

Transform tribal knowledge into documented procedures that reduce cognitive load during stressful incidents. Runbooks should provide step-by-step instructions for common scenarios, including debugging approaches and resolution steps.

Effective runbooks contain specific commands to run, expected outputs, and decision trees based on observations. Vague guidance like “check the logs” doesn’t help during 3 AM incidents. Specific guidance like “run kubectl get pods -n production | grep CrashLoopBackOff to identify failing containers” provides actionable direction.

Automate Investigation Steps

Many incident response tasks involve gathering standard diagnostic information: checking service health, reviewing recent deployments, examining error rates, identifying affected regions.

Automate these routine investigation steps so they execute when incidents open. Engineers receive comprehensive context immediately instead of manually collecting it while under stress. This accelerates response and reduces busywork.

Enable Self-Service Remediation

Common remediation actions—restarting services, clearing caches, scaling capacity, triggering backups—can be automated with appropriate safeguards. This doesn’t eliminate on-call entirely but reduces interruptions for straightforward problems.

Implement automation that attempts standard fixes automatically before paging humans. If a service becomes unresponsive, automatic restart attempts can resolve many issues without human intervention. Only page if automation fails to restore service.

Monitor Automation Effectiveness

Track which automated remediations succeed versus which require human escalation. High escalation rates indicate automation needs refinement or the problem pattern has changed. Successful automation patterns suggest opportunities for similar approaches elsewhere.

Continuously improve automation based on incident patterns. The goal isn’t full automation—it’s reducing the volume of routine interruptions so engineers can focus on genuinely complex problems requiring human judgment.

Balance Workload During On-Call Periods

On-call duty itself creates cognitive load even without active incidents. Combining full development responsibilities with on-call availability guarantees stress and degraded performance in both areas.

Reduce Development Commitments

Adjust sprint planning to account for on-call duty. Engineers on call should carry reduced feature work or focus on interruptible tasks like technical debt, documentation improvements, and tool development.

Typical approach: reduce development workload by 30-50 percent during on-call weeks, calibrating based on actual interrupt patterns. Some teams designate on-call weeks for operational improvements directly: automation development, monitoring enhancement, runbook creation.

Protect Focus Time

Even reduced workload requires focused attention. Block calendar time for deep work during business hours while on call. Communicate these focus periods to teams so they understand when synchronous collaboration is available versus when asynchronous communication is preferred.

This doesn’t mean ignoring critical alerts—it means protecting engineers from non-urgent interruptions during already fragmented time.

Provide Decompression After Major Incidents

Major incidents drain engineers physically and emotionally. Immediate return to normal workload after resolving a critical overnight outage compounds exhaustion.

Implement formal decompression policies: after incidents requiring more than two hours of overnight work, provide flex time the following day. Engineers shouldn’t arrive at 9 AM for meetings after resolving a 4 AM database failure.

Options include late starts, work-from-home flexibility, or completely cleared schedules for incident documentation and recovery. Recognize the real cost of major incidents on individual well-being.

Compensate On-Call Appropriately

On-call duty restricts personal freedom and creates ongoing stress. Expecting engineers to carry this responsibility without recognition breeds resentment and accelerates turnover.

Provide Financial Compensation

Common approaches include:

On-call stipends: Fixed payment per on-call period regardless of alert volume. Recognizes the availability requirement itself has value.

Per-incident bonuses: Additional payment per alert response, especially for overnight and weekend interruptions. Acknowledges the actual disruption caused.

Overtime compensation: Hour-for-hour payment for time spent responding to incidents outside business hours. Treats on-call work as the labor it is.

Fair compensation varies by industry, location, and incident frequency, but the principle remains: engineers sacrifice personal time and cognitive freedom for organizational operational needs. That sacrifice warrants recognition.

Offer Time Compensation

Financial compensation alone doesn’t restore disrupted sleep or missed personal events. Time-based compensation addresses these aspects:

Flex time: Allow engineers to arrive late or leave early the day after overnight incidents proportional to time spent responding.

Comp time: Earn paid time off for on-call work—common formula is one day PTO for every week on call or overtime hours banked at 1.5x rate.

Reduced schedules: After particularly brutal on-call periods, provide lighter workload weeks for recovery.

Time compensation proves especially important in organizations unable to offer competitive financial bonuses but capable of providing schedule flexibility.

Foster Supportive Team Culture

Technical solutions alone don’t prevent burnout. Organizational culture determines whether on-call remains sustainable long-term.

Practice Blameless Incident Response

Incidents happen. How organizations respond to incidents shapes whether engineers feel safe being on call.

Blameless culture treats incidents as learning opportunities focusing on system improvements rather than individual mistakes. When 3 AM alerts wake engineers, they shouldn’t also fear blame for however they respond under stress.

Fear-based incident response compounds on-call stress and encourages engineers to avoid acknowledging problems, making incidents worse. Psychological safety allows honest communication about what’s broken and collaborative problem-solving.

Share On-Call Experiences

Regular forums where engineers discuss on-call experiences surface problems requiring attention. Monthly retrospectives specifically examining on-call patterns reveal trends invisible to individual engineers.

Questions to explore:

• Which alerts consistently prove non-actionable?
• What times of day see excessive interruptions?
• Which types of incidents lack adequate runbooks?
• Where does automation fall short?
• When do engineers feel most stressed or unsupported?

Anonymous surveys complement open discussion by surfacing sensitive concerns individuals might hesitate voicing publicly.

Recognize Exceptional Response

Engineers who handle major incidents skillfully, support teammates effectively, or improve on-call systems deserve explicit recognition.

This doesn’t mean celebrating overtime—it means acknowledging the real contribution of maintaining operational reliability. Public appreciation during team meetings, formal performance review credit, and leadership visibility for on-call excellence validate this critical work.

Empower Engineers to Improve Systems

Engineers directly experiencing on-call pain understand what improvements would help most. Empower them to dedicate time toward those improvements: fixing problematic alerts, developing automation, improving documentation, enhancing tooling.

Allocate dedicated sprint capacity for operational improvements driven by on-call engineers. Treat operational excellence as engineering work deserving time and resources, not “extra work” squeezed into gaps.

Implement Multi-Region Coverage Models

Geographic distribution enables sustainable coverage models impossible with single-region teams.

Follow-the-Sun Detailed Implementation

Follow-the-sun coverage eliminates night work entirely when implemented correctly:

Each region maintains their own roster covering their business hours. As the workday ends in Asia-Pacific, they execute formal handoff to the starting-day Europe team. Europe hands off to Americas at their end of day.

Requires minimum three to four engineers per region for sustainable rotation within each timezone. Total team size appears larger but enables completely normal working hours across all geographies.

Handoffs need documentation: current ongoing incidents, recent changes, systems in maintenance. Tools that maintain incident context and on-call scheduling simplify this coordination.

Primary/Secondary Coverage Models

Single-region teams can implement primary/secondary coverage where two engineers share each shift. Primary handles all initial alerts. Secondary provides backup for escalation or if primary is unavailable.

This prevents single points of failure while distributing psychological burden—knowing backup exists reduces stress even when carrying primary responsibility. Rotations alternate roles so everyone develops both primary response skills and secondary escalation judgment.

Requires larger team size but significantly improves sustainability and coverage reliability.

Measure and Monitor Burnout Indicators

Proactive measurement identifies burnout before it drives attrition.

Track On-Call Burden Metrics

Quantitative metrics reveal uneven burden distribution and problematic patterns:

Alerts per shift: Sustained high alert volume per on-call period indicates systemic alerting problems or insufficient team size.

Overnight interruptions: Frequent sleep disruption predicts burnout faster than total alert volume. Track nighttime alerts separately.

Time to acknowledge: Increasing acknowledgment delays suggest declining engagement—early burnout warning sign.

Incident duration: Extended incidents compound stress. Track both frequency and duration of major incidents.

Target metrics: fewer than 5 alerts per on-call period, maximum 2 overnight interruptions per week, acknowledgment within 5 minutes.

Conduct Regular Burnout Assessments

Standardized burnout assessment tools provide objective measurement:

Maslach Burnout Inventory or similar validated instruments measure emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and sense of reduced personal accomplishment. Administered quarterly, these tools track trends over time and identify individuals needing support.

Simpler approaches include regular pulse surveys asking engineers to rate on-call stress, sustainability, and work-life balance on consistent scales. Anonymous surveys encourage honest responses.

Monitor Attrition and Retention

Exit interviews with departing engineers often reveal on-call burden as contributing factor. Track whether engineers leaving cite on-call stress as reason.

Within teams, monitor tenure patterns. Short average tenure despite competitive compensation suggests cultural or workload problems. Rapidly turning over on-call rotations creates knowledge loss and perpetuates the burnout cycle for remaining members.

Create Escalation Safety Nets

No engineer should feel solely responsible for resolving every possible incident.

Define Clear Escalation Paths

Establish and communicate explicit escalation criteria and escalation paths. Engineers need to know:

• When to escalate based on severity, duration, or technical complexity
• Who to escalate to for different types of problems
• What information to provide during escalation
• That escalation is expected and encouraged, not failure

Fear of escalating leads to exhausted engineers struggling alone with problems beyond their expertise. Clear escalation removes stigma and enables appropriate distribution of difficult incidents.

Implement Subject Matter Expert On-Call

Specialist on-call rotations for complex subsystems reduce primary on-call burden. Database experts, network specialists, security engineers maintain separate on-call schedules for their domains.

Primary on-call handles initial response and investigation. When incidents require specialized knowledge, they escalate to subject matter expert on-call who provides domain expertise while primary on-call continues coordination.

Maintain Management Escalation

Engineering managers and technical leads participate in escalation chains for major incidents. This isn’t just organizational awareness—it’s distributing the responsibility for operational reliability across appropriate seniority levels.

Critical incidents benefit from experienced leadership to make business-critical decisions, coordinate cross-team response, and handle stakeholder communication. This support reduces stress on primary responders who can focus on technical resolution.

Conclusion

On-call burnout results from systematic organizational choices: undersized teams, poor alert quality, excessive workload, inadequate compensation, and unsupportive culture. Each of these factors falls within leadership control to address.

Sustainable on-call requires intentional design across rotation schedules, alert configuration, automation investment, workload balance, and cultural support. Organizations that treat on-call sustainability as an engineering problem to solve—rather than an unavoidable cost of operations—maintain both service reliability and team health.

Start by assessing your current state: measure alert volume and quality, evaluate rotation fairness, survey team burnout indicators, and identify highest-impact improvements. Implement changes systematically, measuring results and iterating based on team feedback.

The goal isn’t eliminating on-call duty—operational reliability requires human oversight. The goal is making on-call sustainable, compensated fairly, and supported organizationally so engineers can maintain both system health and their own well-being.

Tools like Upstat support sustainable on-call through automated rotation scheduling with holiday and time-off exclusions, override flexibility for personal circumstances, and fair workload distribution integrated with incident response workflows.