Most on-call schedules are designed in a slack thread, in 20 minutes, by whoever drew the short straw. Then the team lives with it for years. The math is almost never done, and the result is the same in every company: a few engineers burn out and quit, and management is surprised.
Here's the math, in the order it matters.
Page volume per engineer per week
Add up every page your team got last quarter. Divide by 13 (weeks per quarter). Divide again by the number of engineers in the rotation.
If the answer is more than 3 pages per engineer per week, you have a burnout problem. The exact number doesn't matter; the trajectory does. If it's growing quarter over quarter, your team is going to lose people.
