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Being on call sucks

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Re: Being on call sucks

#11

Post by Sankozi »

cube2222 wrote: post #8
Broken_Hippo wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

6. You are paid an amount for every hour of being on-call. This should be on top of your base pay. This is important. If you are on-call, you do not have the freedom that you would otherwise have and you should be compensated for this.

If it's in the contract you sign, then it's already priced in. I don't see much value in specifically outlining which part is base and which is for oncall, if oncall is mandatory.

If contract says how many on call hours are per month then agree.

Usually those hours are harder to predict compared to working hours so it is much easier to pay for them outside of typical monthly salary.

Re: Being on call sucks

#12

Post by tayo42 »

Yeah oncall is horrible. If things needed to be up 24/7, then some team should be staffed 24/7 around the world.

The worse part of oncall is the control of your life it has. for one week I can't do anything I would normally do. (if your company actually compensates for this, let me know where i can a apply, or better, if it doesn't have oncall at all!) Of course managers are never oncall 24/7. The worse is they give the excuse well im on call all the time by default since im the one manager. But theyre not reorganizing their life and putting their off work hobbies on hold becasue of it are they?

> a monitoring change that fixes some flaky alert that might page somebody about once every six weeks.

These kind of things suck. I was on a team where we had tons of these, 10 alerts like this mean your getting pages all the time. No single alert is worth the time investment. Worse was a manager insisted there will always be a base line of alerts that go off and we will just live with it.

Teams never seem to understand how to alert on stuff. Ive been paged for things going off, that might indicate a problem, then you get stuck sticking around because someone else wants to just wait and see what happens. "We should just be cautious" Its impossible to push back on these things, your just going against someones gut feeling, like maybe one day we will want to know, and everyone needs to protect them selves.

Re: Being on call sucks

#13

Post by stevekemp »

Broken_Hippo wrote: post #7
cube2222 wrote: post #6

On-call is just fine as long as: 1. There is a rotation. 2. There are few pages, preferably the median should be 0 per week. 3. Spurious / non-actionable alerts get fixed right away (with very high priority) 4. You're not up more than 1 week per 1-1.5 month. 5. You subtract middle of the night pages from your next working day, with bad nights resulting in a day off. Being on-call doesn't mean working overtime. As wit…

6. You are paid an amount for every hour of being on-call. This should be on top of your base pay. This is important. If you are on-call, you do not have the freedom that you would otherwise have and you should be compensated for this.

The Finnish collective agreement, which covers IT workers, spells this out explicitly:

* For every hour you're available for on-call you get your regular hourly rate.

* For every incident, which involves you working, you receive twice your hourly salary for the duration.

So companies based her tend to have that as standard, though I'm sure some companies would pay more to stand out.

Re: Being on call sucks

#14

Post by chronid »

cube2222 wrote: post #6

On-call is just fine as long as: 1. There is a rotation. 2. There are few pages, preferably the median should be 0 per week. 3. Spurious / non-actionable alerts get fixed right away (with very high priority) 4. You're not up more than 1 week per 1-1.5 month. 5. You subtract middle of the night pages from your next working day, with bad nights resulting in a day off. Being on-call doesn't mean working overtime. As wit…

I would add a "there is time reserved to write automation to reduce toil".

I have a fair bit of experience in teams with developers hating oncall and the critical issues happen in two camps generally:

- In some cases the org was absolutely open to give them time to resolve issues and automate stuff away (PMs were proposing months for fixes only, and cleaning up boards, etc), there just was no interest until enough escalation happened (creating a massive conflict between ops and devs in the meantime). Even offering to do the work was met with a "stay in your lane" kind of response and no collaboration at all.

- In others the company just did not care, deprioritized tickets until things blew up completely, then finger pointing started and all that nice toxic bullshit.

Re: Being on call sucks

#15

Post by jon-wood »

There are many issues with being on-call, particularly in environments where false alerts routinely happen, and where management aren't in the rota so don't directly feel the pain. One of my biggest though is the concept of a weekly rota, with people being on-call for a full week at a time.

Sometimes that works fine, and you'll get no alerts all week, but incidents tend to cluster. If something has changed that caused an incident odds are it's going to have knock on effects, and you'll see more alarms over the course of a week. With a weekly rota you end up with one person handling that, who by the end of the week is completely destroyed.

Anywhere I've been responsible for setting up an on-call rota I've instead gone for daily rotations. That means if you were up in the night last night, someone else is going to be in the night tonight. It also means if nothing happens you don't have to spend an entire week either cancelling plans or lugging a laptop around with you just in case.

Re: Being on call sucks

#16

Post by Tallianar »

My company(UK) recently tried to force on-call on all engineers.

The initial wording was very restrictive, like 5 minute acknowledgement time and 15 minutes at-laptop. 24/7 for 7 days. They tried to have this implemented without any extra remuneration or perks for the on-call engineer.

On top of it possibly being very illegal, it seems very immoral to spring something like that on people that did on agree to it when they took the job.

I fought for it and I got them to change their policy in 2 mostly meaningful ways:

- It's an opt-in method

- On-call engineers get paid extra for just being on-call and get extra time off whenever they need to actually do something.

This makes sure that you only get people actually willing to do it and there is an incentive. I think it's been quite a successful program!

Luckily I didn't need to get them involved, but in the UK there are unions starting to form for tech workers, I suggest you join one like https://prospect.org.uk/tech-workers

Re: Being on call sucks

#17

Post by throwaway22032 »

Tallianar wrote: post #16

My company(UK) recently tried to force on-call on all engineers. The initial wording was very restrictive, like 5 minute acknowledgement time and 15 minutes at-laptop. 24/7 for 7 days. They tried to have this implemented without any extra remuneration or perks for the on-call engineer. On top of it possibly being very illegal, it seems very immoral to spring something like that on people that did on agree to it when…

A company I used to work for asked me to do on-call, it wasn't in my contract, I declined, that was that.

I don't understand what "force" means in this context - the conversation went something like "I have commitments outside of work" and that was that. I mean, there was a back and forth, but yeah, at the end of the day I took the job knowing I'd be available for the hours they wanted when I took the job.

Re: Being on call sucks

#18

Post by francis-io »

tayo42 wrote: post #12

Yeah oncall is horrible. If things needed to be up 24/7, then some team should be staffed 24/7 around the world. The worse part of oncall is the control of your life it has. for one week I can't do anything I would normally do. (if your company actually compensates for this, let me know where i can a apply, or better, if it doesn't have oncall at all!) Of course managers are never oncall 24/7. The worse is they give…

The problem with oncall teams that are different to the usual SRE/DevOps teams are the lack of understanding of the system. This can obviously be fixed with good documentation, but in reality, no one has good enough docs. The second problem is actually building that team with the skill needed. Someone with the skill to fix complex systems is not going to want to stick around as 1st line on call support.

Re: Being on call sucks

#19

Post by nickjj »

stevekemp wrote: post #13
Broken_Hippo wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

6. You are paid an amount for every hour of being on-call. This should be on top of your base pay. This is important. If you are on-call, you do not have the freedom that you would otherwise have and you should be compensated for this.

The Finnish collective agreement, which covers IT workers, spells this out explicitly: * For every hour you're available for on-call you get your regular hourly rate. * For every incident, which involves you working, you receive twice your hourly salary for the duration. So companies based her tend to have that as standard, though I'm sure some companies would pay more to stand out.

Finally, somewhere that I fully agree with.

Being on-call while you do not get called upon is 24 / 7 work because you have to live your entire life around being available.

Like the blog post mentions, grocery shopping has implications because if you happen to have an on-call event while shopping it means leaving your cart to run to your car to address the situation because you can't leave your house without your work laptop.

It means never going to the beach alone on a Saturday because while you could bring your laptop with you, if you go swimming and there's an on-call event you can't address it because you have no way to get notified while you're swimming in the ocean.

It also means going to the movies with an expectation that if you get called 15 minutes into the movie you're leaving. Likewise, if you're mid-date and get called you're out of luck.

It means never enjoying being able to walk around while being disconnected from the world. It means if you're at your mom's funeral giving a eulogy you leave mid-speech to address PagerDuty.

Then there's knowing at any given second your phone can notify you of an event and you have to put the volume at maximum and place it right next to your face every night with an expectation that you could be woken up at any second.

Re: Being on call sucks

#20

Post by Hamuko »

stevekemp wrote: post #13
Broken_Hippo wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

6. You are paid an amount for every hour of being on-call. This should be on top of your base pay. This is important. If you are on-call, you do not have the freedom that you would otherwise have and you should be compensated for this.

The Finnish collective agreement, which covers IT workers, spells this out explicitly: * For every hour you're available for on-call you get your regular hourly rate. * For every incident, which involves you working, you receive twice your hourly salary for the duration. So companies based her tend to have that as standard, though I'm sure some companies would pay more to stand out.

I've definitely seen on-call compensation implemented differently than stated in the collective agreement. And not in the positive direction. Thankfully it wasn't mandatory, so it was a very definite possibility to not opt in.
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