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Being on call sucks

bobbiechen.com

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Re: Being on call sucks

#31

Post by Tallianar »

throwaway22032 wrote: post #28
Tallianar wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forced means, they didn't announce it as you could not do it. It's was a "be on-call" or you are out. In a call I was explicitly told "every company does it like this, if that's not ok you might not be a right fit for this company".

Well, sure. I don't think anyone is the right fit for any relationship in which one side attempts to change the parameters without consultation. It just doesn't make any logistical sense. You may as well ask a teenager doing a weekend job to come in on Tuesday. They're at school. UK employment law doesn't really permit these sorts of shenanigans.

Indeed, which is why I think they ended backing out. But even if it could, there are definitely better ways of handling it. The deal we ended up getting is one that benefits all sides and I wish more companies would adopt.

Re: Being on call sucks

#32

Post by pelasaco »

Be On-Call is working time. Therefore you should be paid for that.

In the team that I work now, it's voluntary to join the On-Call rotation. People get paid for that. To be on-call and for any incident that they have to actively work. We have as well a partially implemented "follow-the-sun" monitoring team, but that's by accident (our team has members from West coast US, Europe and Australia, but weekends are covered by On-Call)

Re: Being on call sucks

#33

Post by Broken_Hippo »

id wrote: post #24
nickjj wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>It means if you're at your mom's funeral giving a eulogy you leave mid-speech to address PagerDuty. You should not be on-call while you're at your mom's funeral, period.

While I agree totally that you Shouldn't be, we all know that some places will try to force this on you.

Re: Being on call sucks

#34

Post by sylens »

I have an opportunity to move into an all-remote role that would require me to be on call 24x7 for one week every 3 or 3.5 months. I asked about the frequency of incidents that required the on call person to be pages and it looked like on a bad week, it was about 7 total - a good week was 0. I’m personally torn on whether or not I’ll be okay with the on-call lifestyle so I appreciated this piece for giving me some food for thought.

Re: Being on call sucks

#35

Post by Broken_Hippo »

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.

Because if you are supposed to be prepared for sudden work outside your normal work hours, you should be compensated outside of your standard pay. Period.

And sure, it is priced in because the companies can get away with it. This doesn't mean it is right or fair as the price is always going to be in the company's favor and rarely fair to the employee. For example: My brother worked for a US railroad. He didn't have a set schedule. Instead, he got 10 hours rest after a shift and then he was on call. They only closed down on Christmas and New Year's. You were expected to do this on-call work perpetually. The money was good for the area as were the benefits. They advertised in depressed areas without much opportunity, so it made it easier to prey on folks that will accept the poor treatment. I'm pretty sure having to pay folks for each of those hours would change the behavior of the company in the employee's favor.

So yeah, even one hour of 'on-call' should be paid extra, outside of your basepay. Even for companies and industries that aren't being actively evil so that it doesn't happen in the future.

Re: Being on call sucks

#37

Post by Fire-Dragon-DoL »

gc22browsing wrote: post #23
indigochill wrote: post #5

My team has what we call "the strike team" which is not just on-call but even during the day, your job is basically to make everything more robust (as opposed to what we do normally, which is work on new systems and features). So just last week or so there was an alert on Sunday that I then spent the week to fix permanently. These are also services that my team are the sole developers on so I know when I fix somethin…

I used to work for a small systems integrator. We used on-call mobile phones, the "hot potato" was carried by the on-call engineer. Any actual time worked outside of core-working hours was paid back in the form of time-off-in-lieu. The salary generously reflected the being on-call requirement. The other factor was that a "call-out" was not completed until the root cause was fixed. I believe the real reason for the co…

I don't think time off is enough,unless with a multiplier. 1 hour of on call task at 4am will affect the entire day, possibly the next one

Re: Being on call sucks

#38

Post by cube2222 »

nickjj wrote: post #19
stevekemp wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You're using "never" everywhere here. That is in my opinion the main red flag here.

On-call should be at most one week in four-six. Moreover, with a healthy on-call culture (where stuff is fixed, and alerts happen rarely in practice), usually you can pass/swap on-call to others for an evening, or for an afternoon, or for a weekend, as almost always there is somebody who's plan is "sitting at home" and nobody minds having the pager in such circumstances if it almost never pages outside of working hours.

Re: Being on call sucks

#39

Post by dkyc »

oogali wrote: post #26

After years of iteration, here’s what our team does. The team is remote and distributed across multiple time zones ranging from West Coast US to Western Europe. This gets us as close to round the world coverage as we can have. There are two people on call for each shift, each shift lasts a week. It will typically (but not always) be one person from US and one person from UK/EU. This helps reduce the single personal c…

How does it work for you to be on-call 24/7 for escalation? I get that that ends up happening for many committed founders/operators/managers, but I struggle how that can be a real strategy.

Are you never off-grid for a bit, or drunk in a bar, or just on a real no-work vacation? There seem to be situations where being on call just isn’t feasible.

Re: Being on call sucks

#40

Post by g051051 »

> Being On-Call Sucks

Which is why I won't do it. Either hire people specifically to do it, or provide sufficient incentives so that people volunteer. Being a good "first responder" is a skill and not everyone has it or wants it.

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