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.

The findings are that traditional on-call models and copy-paste practices aren't cutting it. As our research has uncovered, the misalignment between how organizations structure on-call work and the cognitive demands these systems place on engineers creates ripple effects that impact everything from employee retention to spending.

The talk and the underlying research point to a fundamental issue that organizations are not set up to support on-call work.

If this sort of stuff excites you, you should use Hotpot because we’ve built all this and more into Hotpot's scheduler and handoff features. You get a world-class on-call program for your entire organization!

Status Woah

We're collecting our ongoing research at Status Woah. We'll be updating that site with reports, insights, and more research opportunities in the future. Sign up for the newsletter to be notified of future work!

Thanks

A huge thank you to all of the folks helped in our research and to Dr. Laura Maguire and Dr. Morgan Reynolds for their work!