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Here's how my company does it: - $200 for being available for the week. Must be within 1hr of the office should the call require you to come in to use special equipment - All calls first are screened by our Sales team: "Can this wait until business hours tomorrow? There is a substantial call out fee" - 1hr minimum for phone support - 3hr minimum for us logging in with our laptops - 1.5x rate for calls during "days" (…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
While what your company is doing is commendable (most don't pay extra or rotate in that fashion) #3 is a red flag for me because it sounds like the overly friendly but in the end passive aggressive and unprofessional atmosphere I've witnessed at startups and midsize companies who pretend they're startups. If on call is optional what's with the social penalty for people not wanting to do it. IMO what companies should…
> If on call is optional what's with the social penalty for people not wanting to do it. Because many optional activities have an impact on your peers and they are unlikely to judge you strictly based upon your job duties?
As far as your impact-on-peers argument -- you could "optionally" also stay 5 hours after when you normally go home to help reduce workload for your peers and help them, do you do that? No? What about 4 hours? what about 3? 2? Where is it fair to stop? The rest of the adult world calls this professionalism, and you stop at what's required of you as your job duty, put forth in your employment contract. In the course of fulfilling that duty you're expected to be reasonably courteous, not to subscribe to some weird hostage situation where the rest of your team suffers if you don't do something that was marked as optional.
On my last job somebody told my it's my turn for the support phone. In our case text messages if web based products are down. I never heard of it before, not during my interview or first month, never. I didn't know how to react and said sure, here's my number. After waking up twice during the night I decided to mute my phone completly from 10pm to 7am. Sometimes I woke up and had 50 messages and would try to solve th…
On my last job somebody told my it's my turn for the support phone. In our case text messages if web based products are down. I never heard of it before, not during my interview or first month, never. I didn't know how to react and said sure, here's my number. After waking up twice during the night I decided to mute my phone completly from 10pm to 7am. Sometimes I woke up and had 50 messages and would try to solve th…
I largely believe developers should be responsible for their work, which includes meeting the support requirements out of hours, and understanding the tooling and instrumentation required to keep their work healthy. However, hiring people and not telling them this is part of the job is insanely unfair. People should get paid for being on-call. Further still, if something is going to wake me up during the night, I wou…
Definitely
> which includes meeting the support requirements out of hours
Definitely not
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure about this. Separating dev work like that is a risk to get architecture astronauts in low stress position with a bunch of peons suffering for their sins in the trenches. Concentration is not a good argument, bug fixing requires no less of that and is often compounded by time pressure.
Bug fixing is very different from being on-call. I don't see the correlation between getting a full night's sleep each night and being an "architecture astronaut".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tell me more about this “contract” you speak of. We must work in very different industries if you get anything remotely like what you describe.
If you're not getting a written contract you're not working in the industry, you're the victim of a fraud.
On my last job somebody told my it's my turn for the support phone. In our case text messages if web based products are down. I never heard of it before, not during my interview or first month, never. I didn't know how to react and said sure, here's my number. After waking up twice during the night I decided to mute my phone completly from 10pm to 7am. Sometimes I woke up and had 50 messages and would try to solve th…
> After waking up twice during the night I decided to mute my phone completly from 10pm to 7am. Have you considered mentioning this to your colleagues, boss or anyone telling you it's your turn? If not - it's really not cool towards your colleagues, boss and organization in general.
a) my wife
b) my kids
c) willing to pay me
On my last job somebody told my it's my turn for the support phone. In our case text messages if web based products are down. I never heard of it before, not during my interview or first month, never. I didn't know how to react and said sure, here's my number. After waking up twice during the night I decided to mute my phone completly from 10pm to 7am. Sometimes I woke up and had 50 messages and would try to solve th…
I largely believe developers should be responsible for their work, which includes meeting the support requirements out of hours, and understanding the tooling and instrumentation required to keep their work healthy. However, hiring people and not telling them this is part of the job is insanely unfair. People should get paid for being on-call. Further still, if something is going to wake me up during the night, I wou…
Do you think the same about your previous jobs? If they find a bug you wrote you should come in and fix it?
Kayak.com co-founder Paul English on this topic (2010): "The engineers and I handle customer support. When I tell people that, they look at me like I'm smoking crack. They say, "Why would you pay an engineer $150,000 to answer phones when you could pay someone in Arizona $8 an hour?" If you make the engineers answer e-mails and phone calls from the customers, the second or third time they get the same question, they'…
While in reality at least in my experience the developer would be very much happy to fix the code, it's just that you don't get any time to do that. It's only new features and new products.
And if you think that's bad, let me tell you about my friend. He's the only cardiologist in town...