I carry the on-call pager about a week in every six. I have done so for most of the past decade. The phrase pager is anachronistic — what I actually carry is a phone, a laptop, a hardware MFA token, and a small notebook that lives in my back pocket — but the discipline is the one that began with pagers in 1990s NOC rotas, and the word still does most of the work.
A year ago I wrote a short post arguing that the chief executive carrying the pager was, in a small specialist firm, a sensible discipline rather than a vanity. Several people I respect disagreed with that post at the time, and most of them have either retracted or refined their disagreement since. This post is the version of the same argument I would now write, with a year more of running it.
What carrying the pager actually means
It does not, in any usefully literal sense, mean answering every call. The firm has trained on-call engineers and a defined rota. The vast majority of calls — perhaps 95% — never reach me. They are dealt with by the engineer on rota, escalated to the practice lead if scope or severity warrants, and never need my involvement.
What carrying the pager means is being available to the engineer on rota as a senior backstop, every hour of every day for one week in six. It means being reachable, being sober, being in possession of a working device, and being mentally ready to be useful within ten minutes of a call. It means the engineer on rota knows, before they pick up the customer call, that they have a backstop. It means the customer, if it comes to it, can speak to the chief executive of the firm they have retained, on a Sunday morning, without the engineer having to navigate organisational permissions to escalate. It means the firm has a culture where senior leaders carry actual operational responsibility, not just symbolic responsibility.
That, I now think, is the part of the discipline that matters most. Not the calls. The culture the discipline creates.
What it has taught me about my own succession
The most uncomfortable thing the discipline has taught me is that, for too long, the firm did not have a mature pool of senior engineers who could carry the backstop role. There were two reasons: I had carried it, in part, because I enjoyed it, and the existence of my carrying it had reduced the gravitational pull on the next layer down to develop the capacity. The discipline cannot be a one-person discipline. It has to be a rotated discipline among three or four senior leaders, with the chief executive as one of them, not the only one.
I have, over the past twelve months, deliberately rotated the role across three senior leaders in addition to myself. I now carry it one week in six rather than one in three. The capacity at the next layer has grown noticeably as a result. The mistake had been not the discipline but the failure to distribute it.
This is the lesson I would write down for any founder of a small specialist firm who is reading this and considering doing the same thing. Distribute the discipline, not the symbol of the discipline. If you carry the pager but no one else in the firm does, the result is not resilience. It is fragility wearing the costume of resilience.
What the work looks like at three in the morning
It is worth saying, plainly, what the work actually looks like, because the romanticised version of incident-response does the discipline a disservice.
The work at three in the morning is: a customer call, usually from a service desk that has noticed something off; a quick check of the customer's monitoring; a triage conversation with the engineer on rota about what we are actually seeing; a decision tree about whether to wake further people; the slow assembly of a working hypothesis from incomplete telemetry; the necessary uncomfortable acceptance that, at three in the morning, the working hypothesis is probably wrong in some way that will become clear in daylight; the writing-down of decisions in the case log; the handover, if the case extends beyond the night, to the day team.
Most of this is unglamorous. None of it is heroic. The skill is not brilliant insight at 3am; the skill is competent process at 3am despite being tired. The competent process is the thing the discipline produces. The brilliant insight, when it happens, is a bonus.
Why the chief executive carrying it still matters
The argument I made a year ago was that, in a small specialist firm, the chief executive carrying the pager produces three things: trust with customers, retention of operational instinct, and the cultural signal that operational work is honourable. I now think two of those are right and one is not quite the right framing.
Trust with customers is right. The customer who has been told that, if it gets bad, they can call me, behaves differently in the months that nothing has gone wrong. The relationship is different in shape. I value that.
Retention of operational instinct is also right, with a caveat: the operational instinct is harder to retain at scale than it was in the small firm. As the firm has grown — and now, post-merger, grown further — my own actual contribution to a live case is smaller. I am, in many cases, an organisational expediter rather than a technical contributor. The instinct is still useful for expedition. It is not the same as the instinct that did the work.
Cultural signal I would now frame more carefully. The signal works when the chief executive carrying the pager is one of several leaders doing so, not the only one. If the founder is the only senior leader carrying it, the signal that gets received by the rest of the firm is not operational work is honourable but the founder does not trust anyone else with it. That is the opposite of what one is trying to achieve. The signal works only when the discipline is collective.
One sentence
A senior leader who carries an on-call pager is a senior leader who has skin in the operational reality of the firm — which is the only sensible position from which to make decisions about what the firm should do next. Carry the pager because it is honest. Distribute the pager because anything else is fragility in costume.
That is the year's lesson. The pager goes back into the rota tonight.