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

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

#31

Post by kgwxd »

SheinhardtWigCo wrote: post #28
getmeinrn wrote: post #6

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, bec…

> Don't let this happen to you. What can you really do if they lie in the interview?

> I was put in the awkward position of attempting to renegotiate my salary after just getting hired, or not being a team player.

Stop letting them make you feel bad for renegotiating salary after the job description changed, and call them out on the complete bullshit "team player" phrase. If they fire you, might suck for a bit, but hopefully you'll end up better off. If they keep you, start looking for another job ASAP anyway. Good companies don't play those games, fuck them.

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

#32

Post by denkmoon »

My colleagues get monday off if they are on-call over the weekend, and are paid an hourly rate for incident responses. I am not sure on the exact figure as I declined to go on-call and I would encourage you to do the same unless the compensation is favourable. Developers are not support staff, developers being on-call allows the business to skimp on proper support processes.

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

#33

Post by alex_lav »

SheinhardtWigCo wrote: post #28
getmeinrn wrote: post #6

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, bec…

> Don't let this happen to you. What can you really do if they lie in the interview?

They say they don't have an on call rotation. You say you want some amount increase during on-call rotations included in your offer, even though they don't currently do an on call rotation. If they push back, you say "Well you don't have an on-call, so if it never comes up it never comes up". If they flatout refuse, they intend to have you work for free.

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

#35

Post by freitasm »

JonMR wrote: post #9

Prior employer paid $50/day for on call. Not a ton, but it helped me feel like the valued and understood the sacrifice of always having to be within X minutes of a device.

"... always having to be within X minutes of a device."

Back when I was in a technical role I used to be rostered on-call every few weeks. That included being on a conference call within five minutes of being paged (yep, oldstyle). This meant planning ahead to be at home at all times that week.

We were paid to be on-call and paid hourly if a call actually came in.

These days I see people saying they're expected to be on call and not being paid more than they're already paid. That's crazy.

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

#37

Post by digitalsushi »

Base comp. I'm on call 365/7/24. But I get called about twice per year. If I can't be resposible for it, I just make arrangements. It's a good salary and I dont think twice about it. I'm tier 3, and tier 2 should be the last call made if everything works out.

20 years earlier I was a kid working at an ISP earning 31k USD salary with the same 365/7/24, and getting paged about three times a week off hours, and most of them being drive outs, either to the POP an hour out, or our furthest problem client 3 hours away. I had no idea that it was a bad deal. Even with all the learning I was doing ... it was a bad deal. Most of those pages during the winter were our AC freezing cause we wouldnt pay maintanence on it. 120kbtu in a 12x16 room, the AC would freeze shut, and I'd drive in at 2am to leave a window open. One side of the room was -10F, the other side was 120F. We didn't stay in business. It's how I got in with life and went to college.

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

#38

Post by kcplate »

SheinhardtWigCo wrote: post #28
getmeinrn wrote: post #6

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, bec…

> Don't let this happen to you. What can you really do if they lie in the interview?

In a nearly 40 year career one thing has been constant for me…your position will always change and evolve beyond what you were told in your interview. That leaves you with the options to either adapt to the new normal, to reject the change and move on, or to try and renegotiate (and good luck with that last one).

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

#39

Post by deathanatos »

> Do you get extra comp for being on call? Do you get extra for responding to incidents out of hours?

No, and no.

> Or is it baked into your base comp?

Also nope. :(

> management is about to start asking folks to be on call. I'm not sure what to ask for or if its normal to not get anything extra.

I'd say it's quite reasonable to ask; my understanding is that SRE at Google is +$10k vs. SWE; you could attempt to do research on those positions to see what the relative difference between them is and use that as an example of what the market pays.

But in my experience, you can ask, management will "listen", and then proceed to do bumpkiss. Management theory these days, AFAICT, is geared towards driving company's into the ground by trying to extract more and more value from less and less, until there's nothing left. Good luck.

I hope they listen: IME "yes, we'll pay" answers here keep good engineers around, and "no" readily drives out good engineers.

I'll also echo what someone else says in the thread:

> If I'm working past 5pm, sometime in next few days, I will work X hours less.

Particularly if it cuts into sleep: there's no practical benefit to even trying to work, if you're sleep deprived: https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/emres/longhourstraining/impaired.h...

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