I own a marketing agency. I check my email often just on case but I rarely have to hop on my laptop after hours. I'll probably pen an after hours short email a few times a week though.
Ask HN: How often are you on call?
41–46 of 46 posts
Re: Ask HN: How often are you on call?
#42I work at a 100-person startup. We currently do 1 week secondary followed by 1 week primary. This comes up every 2.5 months. On-call is 8am-8pm with any overnight pages going to execs. I'll not that we originally had people doing daily shifts and it was a huge pain for those who were religiously observant. It was much harder to get someone to cover a Saturday or Sunday shift since nobody wants to cover those. Will se…
do you have any staff in other timezones to get better night coverage?
Re: Ask HN: How often are you on call?
#43Never, and I don't consider any job that demands this. Learn what work-life separation means.
Seems unreasonable to say never. Like what a sibling commenter said, it seems like you’ll miss out on potential earnings in your career by being this inflexible.
Just like I miss out on some earnings by not being a contract killer. Some things aren't worth it. That is a personal choice. And this is mine.
Re: Ask HN: How often are you on call?
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
> or shall we say the world relies on some people not having [...]? It does rely on that. Supply and demand works that way. Eventually the offered price is enough to change some minds. I'll change mine at about $3k/hour-on-call.
I’ll do it for $100/h on call. Sweet gig if you do 40h a month on call that’s a sweet $4000 a month and hopefully most times you won’t even be called.
Sounds like you’re being a facetious but there are plenty of companies that do pay you if you do end up getting paged. Not for being scheduled on call. Plenty of companies also do 12 hour shifts during the day if you’re on call and have SREs handle the rest for the most part.
Re: Ask HN: How often are you on call?
#45SRE at Google. We are oncall for 12h then the other site takes over for the other 12h, so no night shifts. You do that for 7 days in a row once every 5 week-ish. Some team have slight variations on that. We get paged around once per 12h on average but our service is fairly young. More mature services tend to page less I think.
What is the on-call compensation?
Last I knew it was 33.3% time credited for on call hours with 30 minute response requirement and 66.6% time credited for on call hours with 5 minute response time. And it could be taken as additional holiday or as cash.
Re: Ask HN: How often are you on call?
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ll do it for $100/h on call. Sweet gig if you do 40h a month on call that’s a sweet $4000 a month and hopefully most times you won’t even be called.
Sounds like you’re being a facetious but there are plenty of companies that do pay you if you do end up getting paged. Not for being scheduled on call. Plenty of companies also do 12 hour shifts during the day if you’re on call and have SREs handle the rest for the most part.
There are companies that compensate you for all on call hours.
Being paid only if you are paged is not appropriate compensation for interrupting your personal life: having your laptop, reliable internet, cellular coverage, being available on x minutes notice.