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Being on call sucks

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Re: Being on call sucks

#221

Post by PeterisP »

niij wrote: post #184
PeterisP wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO the whole notion of "week of on-call" is ridiculous. Being on-call ready is a shift of (hopefully low-intensity) work time. You can do 8 hour shifts, 12 hour shifts, 24 hour shifts, but you can't do 168 hour shifts for monitoring something, anything - that's impractical and should be illegal. There are (or should be) some minimum standards of rest time that every human being must get, and being on-call is not it…

On-call is meant to be for rare emergencies. If you're getting paged outside of work hours on each 1 week shift then something is wrong. It should in no way be equivalent to 168 hours of work.

If there is an obligation to respond within a certain time, and an obligation to avoid certain activities (whatever you imagine that makes you unable to respond) then those are work hours even if nobody calls. It's exactly like a fireighter shift or call center shift where there happen to be no incoming calls, or a night shift at a remote gas station if no customers come during that night.

And if you're getting paged outside of work hours, then there's zero obligation to answer your phone.

There's no middle ground. If the employer says that these aren't working hours, they have zero right to ask what you're doing at these hours, much less put any conditions on it; it's your right to spend that time fishing in a remote lake with no cell phone service or go on a date or whatever and not even explain anything without any reprimand when you arrive at your scheduled start of work time; and if they want you to commit to a shift, well, "a shift" where employer tells you what to do (e.g. do not go fishing to a remote lake and don't sleep for 12 hours with your phone off) is by definition work hours.

It is quite plausible that most of the times most employees will pick up the phone and solve reasonable issues, but that's an extra courtesy from the employee, going beyond what you can demand or expect; but the moment you start to require that, or ask an employee to precommit that they will definitely be monitoring their phone for rapid response, that means you're effectively assigning those hours as work hours.

It's understandable that being on-call can be very light work in many cases (not all - quite a few counterexamples in this discussion), so you can agree on different compensation for them, but those definitely are work hours (they definitely aren't non-work hours, and there is no middle ground) and thus any rules on length of shifts and rest between shifts can and should apply also for on-call hours.

Re: Being on call sucks

#222

Post by chronid »

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…

> 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.

From an ops person: if an alert does not have: - clear, provable impact on customers (internal/external) - clear documentation (e.g. runbooks) on how to solve it

It should not be an alert. I took this path (successfully) when trying to remove spurious alerts that existed only for the ego of someone (most absurd example, something that started complaining when p99 for some endpoints went >500ms and happened every day when we downscaled the ASGs because business hours were over. No clear path to resolution, and impact was a couple pages opened a bit slower sure - but the number of customers using those pages after hours was It sucks, definitely, but the best way to go around those alerts is to prove they're pointless or a waste of time or can be automated around and should automated around (and I've seen so many servlets leaking memory triggering OS alerts for OS teams or spawning infinite threads and never cleaning up after themselves...).

If the company does not want to do it, and pushes back, I would recommend starting to look for another company. It's sad, but it is what it is. 99.99% of software does not need a follow the sun rotation (or people damned to night shifts), just a bit of thought about what happens when things fail.

Re: Being on call sucks

#223

Post by bpodgursky »

725686 wrote: post #168
bpodgursky wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you're in a really dysfunctional startup, the employees who voluntarily jump in after-hours to fix OC issues are going to be very quickly compensated with raises and refresher option grants. Far better payout generally than a few bucks of overtime. It becomes really obvious who is holding the company together and who is coasting, relying on the "senior" (ie, anyone who puts in the effort) engineers to keep the…

I don't know for startups, but for regular companies... not. You must be very young my friend.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-podgursky-5935aa7/

I'm not exactly anon

Re: Being on call sucks

#224

Post by bennysomething »

Being on call should just be paid at the normal hourly rate. It's an outrageous setup up: we need you to available but don't want to pay you for it.

I did it for a few years and it made me pretty depressed. By the end of it I stopped giving a shit and just resumed my normal Friday night of having a few beers (or a lot of beers). At first they offered me a rate that was less than min wage. I said no until it was an acceptable rate. Every other company seems to pay terrible on call rates in the UK. It makes me angry just thinking about this period of my life.

Seriously, if a company wants to make money doing SAAS then they can't expect to steal employee time. My advice, if asked to do it, refuse until they offer very good money for it. Good luck to them recruiting a system expert to replace you.

Re: Being on call sucks

#225

Post by bpodgursky »

raverbashing wrote: post #153
valeness wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lolol, I've been jumping in after-hours for years. They only take notice when you say "I quit".

And some even later than that, when they go to fix something and they realize they don't know how

It's your job to make your work visible.

Re: Being on call sucks

#226

Post by dylan604 »

bennysomething wrote: post #224

Being on call should just be paid at the normal hourly rate. It's an outrageous setup up: we need you to available but don't want to pay you for it. I did it for a few years and it made me pretty depressed. By the end of it I stopped giving a shit and just resumed my normal Friday night of having a few beers (or a lot of beers). At first they offered me a rate that was less than min wage. I said no until it was an ac…

I've never been in a postion that had on-call responsibilities that was hourly. Everyone of them was salaried positions. Is on-call hourly employees a thing? Sorry, I'm not well versed in how to screw over employees except any of my direct experiences

Re: Being on call sucks

#227

Post by bennysomething »

dylan604 wrote: post #226
bennysomething wrote: post #224

Being on call should just be paid at the normal hourly rate. It's an outrageous setup up: we need you to available but don't want to pay you for it. I did it for a few years and it made me pretty depressed. By the end of it I stopped giving a shit and just resumed my normal Friday night of having a few beers (or a lot of beers). At first they offered me a rate that was less than min wage. I said no until it was an ac…

I've never been in a postion that had on-call responsibilities that was hourly. Everyone of them was salaried positions. Is on-call hourly employees a thing? Sorry, I'm not well versed in how to screw over employees except any of my direct experiences

It is common in UK to be salaried but on call on an hourly rate.

Re: Being on call sucks

#228

Post by bckr »

parasense wrote: post #102

Story time: This one time I was hired as a tier-3 Unix & Linux support engineer at managed-hosting provider who shall not be named. This was back in my prime, I'd already had 10 ~ 15 years industry experience, so I was hired to deal with the really nasty problems that percolated up the chain, and to solve those problems via ongoing process-improvement loop. Over time my job got easier and easier, because lower tier e…

Sounds really unhealthy and I don't understand why you'd stay at that company, but you definitely have an interesting life.

Re: Being on call sucks

#229

Post by niij »

PeterisP wrote: post #221
niij wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On-call is meant to be for rare emergencies. If you're getting paged outside of work hours on each 1 week shift then something is wrong. It should in no way be equivalent to 168 hours of work.

If there is an obligation to respond within a certain time, and an obligation to avoid certain activities (whatever you imagine that makes you unable to respond) then those are work hours even if nobody calls. It's exactly like a fireighter shift or call center shift where there happen to be no incoming calls, or a night shift at a remote gas station if no customers come during that night. And if you're getting paged…

If someone works an on-call rotation and was told about it during the interview process then I see no issue with it. It's baked into the agreed-upon compensation already.

I don't see how you can declare what an employer/employee are allowed to agree to. Working an on-call is completely reasonable for a salaried employee. If the terms changed after you were hired and you're bound by a contract (and cannot leave without penalty for a certain timeframe) then things would be very different. But the majority of the HN audience is in the U.S. where employment is generally at will.

Re: Being on call sucks

#230

Post by stuff4ben »

I used to be an SRE manager for an on-prem cloud at a previous job. What they don't tell you is that even though your team of SREs that you manage has an on-call rotation, whenever there's an incident, they call the on-call and then call their manager and get everyone on a bridge call until the incident is resolved. Which meant I was on-call 24x7x365. I barely lasted a year before I bailed. I am a single parent 50% of the time (shared custody of kids) and it's hard to be on an incident bridge until 3am and then have to get up at 6am to get your kids ready for school.

I'll never accept another job in my lifetime that requires on-call rotation (if I can help it).

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