Ask HN: (How much) do you get paid for being on call?

For me it's built in as a senior software dev, no extra compensation. But, it's 3 or 4 one-week shifts a year because everyone is in the rotation. Usually nothing happens. We are a small company (If either I was in a more junior position, or the on call issues were very frequent, then I might feel differently.

I don't know your situation, but I would ask: what has changed? Is the product turning out to be less reliable than expected, or has the previous arrangement for support failed somehow, funding cut etc.?

In a previous job we built projects with 18 month dev cycles, and then went into a 6 month session of intensive support, basically being on call every day. But we always knew that going in.

It used to be first level on call was a volunteer program at my company. Each week primary got $1000, secondary was $750. Second level was baked in to your salary. The first level on call was always the first responders and should attempt to resolve the problem or at least triage it to be handled during business hours second level on call each engineering team was expected to set up their own schedule and rotation so in first level couldn't handle it they would page out to the appropriate team for the second level to take over.

In my situation when we had this setup first level on call handled about 80% without ever needing to engage the second level on call because we could triage the situation make the customer happy and they were fine to defer to business hours for a final resolution.

Now the first level on call program seems like it's pretty nice incentive for those bonuses some weeks you would literally get nothing but you still got paid for simply being available. Other times when there was a particularly buggy release it was quite annoying. Annoying to the point that volunteers would sign up for first level on call and then drop out within a couple of months because they realized it wasn't always just easy money. Toward the end of the incentive program there was literally just two of us who would rotate between primary and secondary and we had some particularly buggy code releases where it was enough to make me consider quitting the program. Even though the money was still good it's just getting the page is annoying because you never know when it's going to come.

At the beginning of this year management decided to remove the monetary incentive for being first level on call and the two of us who are in the first level on call position when we were on the call and they informed us that the incentive program is going away both of us told them at that moment we were quitting from the voluntary on call program.

So now the on call rotation is management does all first level on calls and second level on call is engineering team specific as before. It is quite a bit more annoying for the engineering teams now because as you can imagine Management's first level on call solve rate is 0% and so second level is always paged out.

I would say that if your company is adding in a new program compensation of some sort should be a part of it. Because if you were hired into a company that had an existing on-call program and you were joining a team where you were expected to be in the on-call rotation you would, hopefully, negotiate your total compensation package to account for that. Generally getting comp time for after hours on call work is insufficient. Because the nature of on-call is that it is unknown when it is coming and how long it will be and will it actually allow you to push your project deadlines out? Most of the time if you're a salaried worker being required to be part of an on-call rotation where you are required to work when directed pushes you out of what could be considered an exempt employee. If you have input into the compensation I would recommend tracking on call hours and getting paid overtime for them. Companies don't like that cuz they feel like they're paying out money when they may not have to but I think it's a reasonable compromise. You get paid for the additional time worked in addition to your normal hours and you are still giving up a certain amount of freedom and autonomy for whatever the rotation schedule is where you need to be able to respond. And giving up that autonomy is kind of a sacrifice for you because you can't plan to be out with friends all night or other such things if you know you may get a call and have to respond. You literally become tethered to a working environment for a week or whatever the on-call shift is. So both sides take some risk. And the monetary compensation and tracking of hours for the company they should consider that a good thing because if on call becomes a major expense that dictates there are other problems in your product. And that is a management problem that needs to be seen and tracked and have a cost on the balance sheet so it will be corrected. Costs unknown are costs uncontrolled and if they can lay them on to an employee where they can claim ignorance all it does is cause burnout and makes good people leave.

At one place I worked, I specifically asked in the interview if we would be on call. "Nope." Within 2 months of being hired, everyone on my team went on call, with no talk of compensation bumps. I was put in the awkward position of attempting to renegotiate my salary after just getting hired, or not being a team player. Don't let this happen to you.

It's good that you're thinking about compensation for this work, because it is work, it is extra, and it should never be done for free. Don't let your employer guilt you into it because "everyone else is on call too." Everyone should have a compensation bump then.

At will employment

Nothing extra, but I have a policy of giving my directs a day off the next week.