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

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

#51

Post by timmit » Mon, Jul 10, 2023, 4:06 AM UTC

The place I used to work in, there is no pay for on-call at all, but give an alternative leave.

The culture the manager/boss want to give to me is that:

- `It is a bonus to have on-call opportunity, so that you can have alternative leave.`

BTW, this is one of the biggest software company in the country I stay, when I heard what he talked to me, I decided to leave this place.

> I did one on-call from 11PM to 1AM to fix one product issue, and they want to give me 1 hour alternative leave for my contribution. It is not fair.

Anyway, I wasn't there anyway. Be aware of this company/culture, `on-call opportunity is a bonus`, no matter how much they pay you.

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

#52

Post by kyriakos » Mon, Jul 10, 2023, 4:10 AM UTC

An important question is what being on call means? Does it mean having a 1 minute response time? Does it mean triaging and escalating? Or do you actually have to fix any issue deploy changes etc? And to what service level? Eg service is down? One user is affected? Etc

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

#53

Post by ikiris » Mon, Jul 10, 2023, 4:45 AM UTC

teeray wrote: post #41

ikiris wrote: post #14

66% of time credit for time spent on call outside business hours regardless if paged or not. Maximum levels of pages etc. Oncall should never be considered built in, it just leads to managerial abuse, and poor practice because its "free".

> Oncall should never be considered built in, it just leads to managerial abuse, and poor practice because its "free". A symptom of this is when fixing bugs is not prioritized because the on-call engineer is a meat robot that “fixes the bug.”

Not to mention it never incentivises having actual business hours coverage instead of ruining someone's nights/weekends, because to do so would then cost the business more than just abusing the unlucky oncaller.

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

#54

Post by mgarfias » Mon, Jul 10, 2023, 5:02 AM UTC

Doodly-squat.

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

#55

Post by trog » Mon, Jul 10, 2023, 5:35 AM UTC

We don't do on call or really any formal after hours support of our application (we are in a fortunate (weird?) spot where our application's users are mostly using it during business hours so there is no huge requirement to maintain it after hours).

Of course, stuff does go wrong, so we do fix a few things after hours if something happens & people are around - we currently just give the team time off in lieu of any hours worked. It's not perfect but most people are OK with it at the moment as it's very infrequent.

Not planning on instituting formal on call until we can ensure people are paid for it but using this period to automate & alarm as must stuff as possible to reduce it to as close to zero as we can.

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

#56

Post by Tao3300 » Mon, Jul 10, 2023, 6:01 AM UTC

ianpenney wrote: post #27

Tao3300 wrote: post #24

It's a good thing you asked. The industry standard is four times your base salary rate and double the time back in PTO. That rate goes up 10x per child in your household. Everyone understands this to be the standard, and if they try to give you less you should quit or find out that your house is a cellular dead zone.

Ok, hah hah. Some of us are managers and need to actually do the negotiations to bring fairness to the job. If you have a way to broker this with the owners of companies that isn't indignant, please help me out. I'd love to make this the reality, but it's just not.

The dead zone thing was a joke. I guess it fell flat.

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

#57

Post by p1esk » Mon, Jul 10, 2023, 6:31 AM UTC

rPlayer6554 wrote: post #21

p1esk wrote: post #3

You can always simply say “no”. The period of layoffs is over - plenty of SWE work is available everywhere.

I was job hunting until a few weeks ago. From my experience this is absolutely not true for junior dev positions. Do your research. It took a while to find a position even with big tech experience.

Don’t be a “junior developer”.

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

#58

Post by thiht » Mon, Jul 10, 2023, 7:10 AM UTC

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…

> on call, with no talk of compensation bumps

Is this legal where you live?

In my previous team, when we got on-call it was roughly 1 week per month (we were 4 in the team), we got an on-call phone, and we were compensated 600€/week of on call without counting the actual interventions. Just being on-call was paid. Having to intervene was compensated on 15 minutes « slices » based on our salary. So if I worked 5 minutes I was paid 15. If I worked 16 minutes I was paid 30. Also we legally needed 11 consecutive hours of sleep, so if I stopped working at 6PM and had to intervene at 0AM, I wouldn’t come to work the next day before 11AM. Oh, and week-end/holiday interventions were paid double.

All of this made sure we almost never had to intervene, because making sure the prod doesn’t break, ever, was top priority.

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

#59

Post by kcplate » Mon, Jul 10, 2023, 11:33 AM UTC

alex_lav wrote: post #47

kcplate wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to get paid by the hour, choose a gig that pays you hourly. If you choose a gig that pays you a salary and is exempt (like many SWEs)…well, you are not technically working for free no matter if you are working inside or outside your regular working hours.

It's very normal to have on-call and overtime stipulations in employment contracts for salaried positions.

Sure, but it’s also very normal not to as well. Positions evolve.

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

#60

Post by bawana » Mon, Jul 10, 2023, 1:04 PM UTC

Doctors do not get paid for being on call or responding to phone calls, unlike attorneys. And after assuming a mountain of debt (med school tuition >70k, intern and residency salary 30-40k) you are privileged to get a job for 90k. And you burned 7-10 of the best years of your life AFTER UNIVERSITY (70k tuition) in school.