Running complex systems is far more than a scheduling exercise — it's a deeply human challenge sitting at the intersection of technical complexity, organizational design, and cognitive psychology. It's common to look to industry "best practices" that focus on tooling and processes, but at Hotpot we want to do more: looking to research — new and old — to fundamentally rethink how on-call work should be structured for people.

Hello friends! We’re excited to begin 2025 by telling you about all the developments in Hotpot.

Hotpot is a new approach to on-call and operations that allows you to do more, go faster, and sleep better. It replaces your existing on-call tools, like PagerDuty. Effortlessly setup, manage, and be on-call without grinding people down. We're looking for pioneers and early adopters to help shape the future of on-call with us!

I am annoyingly chipper in the morning. Mornings are great! A fresh new day, hot coffee, and limitless possibility. That said, I’m picky about being woken up. I only wanna wake up at, you know, morning time. Related, I think on-call is really interesting: exciting new problems, never-before-seen errors, and wild new customer behavior. The part about waking me up in the middle of the night is less so. Life is full of dichotomies!

On-call is vital to take care of our complex systems and customers. It’s where all weird things go that need a human to sort them out. It’s business and off-hours, solo and as a team, automation and manual. On-call is an amazing source of resilience and it deserves the best of tools. That’s why we’re making Hotpot.

On-call is the junk drawer of operations. It’s the landing place of all of the flotsam, from maintenance to customer outages to who-even-knows-what other unwelcome surprises. Even worse, this junk drawer comes with a schedule where a random person is tasked months in advance to somehow make use of its contents.

On-call, you must always be ready to investigate every alert that goes bump in the night, 24/7. With hypercortisolism as your baseline, you then plan your life around this duty. Changing the schedule - even for something as predictable as a dentist appointment - can feel like untying and re-tying a Gordian knot. Adding insult to injury, every team in the organization tends to do all of this a little differently.

I have been on call for 30 years. Being on-call sucks. Managing on-call sucks more.