It's kind of wild that an expensive product with tons of funding and employees is worse than some scripts cooked up by some SREs.
So as cynical as my statement may seem- " It's almost like they wanted it to be easier to just not take time off?" .. user ergonomics just doesn't enter into the conversation at all, because the users are internal devs.. who cares.
I also worked at an org that gave each of 50+ large customers a dedicated slack channel with.. wait for it.. the entire internal 200+ member engineering org in channel with them. You can imagine the mayhem as each customer figured out how to get attention (@here/@channel/@theguythatfixedthislasttime) and "hack the phone tree" as I used to call it.
This also meant the every one of our 200+ engineers was a member of 50+ customer channels which were filled with all levels of noise that 95% of the time had nothing to do with their app/team/function, and could/should be ignored.
They are all surprisingly hopeless. For example, none of them have SCIM integration to make managing your teams in them automatic. All of them have clunky calendar overrides. None of them seem to integrate well with Outlook / Google Calendar, particularly none take into account holidays. Many have no Terraform provider to manage them, and the ones that do are clunky at best, and hard to set-up/manage. OIDC is hit-and-miss. For example, for PagerDuty you need to call up their support team and get them to manually tweak something that's not in the UI settings to get OIDC for Azure AD sign-ins to work.
It's not that management is apathetic. We genuinely don't want to engineers spending their time working around vendor inadequacies and lashing this stuff together with barely-maintained scripting that they resent having to write in the first place. Why would anyone want that? Given there's seemingly no product out there that lets you avoid that, what should we do? When they're all rubbish, you either choose PagerDuty because everyone does, or Opsgenie as a protest vote, because at least both have Terraform providers and plug-ins for other things like Slack and Sentry, etc.
All of us have talked on this thread about all the things PD is bad at, but few have come to the defense with a list of things its great at.
The sales pitch, I am sure, to management is more along the lines of - metrics, dashboards, reports, "accountability", response times, yada yada.. and because management write the checks, I'm sure thats an area they do deliver.
This is absolutely it. Pager Duty don't sell on-call tools to engineers, they sell the idea of having an on-call rota to CTOs, the tools are an implementation detail.
Bottom up engineering tools take more time to start with, but almost always cost less in the long run, contribute to a good engineering culture, and build a sense of ownership.
What's kind of incredible too is they actually lose money still. The losses are growing faster than the revenue. They've only had, what, 14 years to figure this out? You wonder what their staff of 1000ish are working on.
Also, forgot this gem: "On January 21, 2023 PagerDuty CEO Tejada's layoff memo was criticized for insensitivity for inappropriately quoting Martin Luther King, announcing promotions of executives, and tone deafness." (from wiki)