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Being on call sucks

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Re: Being on call sucks

#231

Post by dylan604 »

bennysomething wrote: post #227
dylan604 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Right, and in my situations, if the crisis that demanded I be brought in was solved, it was assumed/expected I'd be taking those hours out of my normal work hours. So maybe leaving early one day, or an entire day depending on the severity. On call hours were treated as a multiple vs one to one.

Seemed pretty sane/rational to me that I never minded being on-call. There were the occassion where I was not immediately available, but I notified everyone when I would be and got to work when I said I would.

I can see where this is ripe for abuse by either side, so I'm not trying to brush off those that are getting abused by it.

Re: Being on call sucks

#232

Post by TheSoftwareGuy »

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.

7. If you are on-call during a holiday, you get an extra vacation day.

This is impoprtant because if you are on-call, you are working, and if it is during a holiday, then that is one less holiday for you.

This could actually be pretty good too. People would be much more willing to cover for others on holidays

Re: Being on call sucks

#233

Post by bckr »

femiagbabiaka wrote: post #78
jon-wood wrote: post #15

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 cause…

Yeah I have a vivid memory of hysterically crying after getting less than 12 hours of sleep over 3 or 4 days during a particularly bad shift. My pager went off 30 minutes before the end of my shift and I lost it. I should’ve passed the pager but I was too “up” to recognize it and my manager at the time was completely clueless about oncall work. Actually at that same company getting paged 8-10 times off-hours during a…

Thanks for sharing that. I had a similar experience at my last job. The emotional/physical toll is so real. On the one hand, guess that's why we get paid? On the other hand, screw that.

Re: Being on call sucks

#234

Post by robalfonso »

Your org needs to be at either end of a spectrum. Either on-call is mostly quiet, and non-disruptive and truly only there for huge issues that happen seldom. Or you staff up a dedicated 24/7 team. If it's in between you need to plan on getting to one end before you wear out your team.

I think on-call and the quality of life component are highly dependent on the company culture, the types of alerts, etc.

My org on-call was laid out like this:

3 days at a time and then a break of X days (depending on team size - This option was chosen by the team)

Comp time for any incidences (plus manager flexibility, up late fixing something no one expects you in early or at all depending on how it went)

We leveraged a provider to handle alert escalation, rotation, phone calls etc. If someone didn't answer it rotated through to the next person and on up to management.

A regular look back at the type of calls coming in, and re-balance of alerting priorities to make sure if someone is going to get a call out of office hours, it better be necessary. We always asked "Could this have waited"

A general culture of helping out, if you couldn't fix something you could ask for anyone else near a machine to handle it.

A general culture of asking could we have automated a fix for this alert before getting a human involved?

Almost all tools were available via mobile and you would be amazed how often you could fix something from a mobile phone. In fact I fixed some service issue in about 10s in a movie, never missed a beat.

Trading on-call windows was typical and easy.

If your org can't do above and is truly wearing people out then you need to go the other way, and just staff up 24/7 and let people have their lives.

Re: Being on call sucks

#235

Post by mlyle »

Broken_Hippo wrote: post #198
mlyle wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What do you mean by "expectation"? One day on call, one day paid overtime; anything else is abusive. I don't think being available for work if an unlikely emergency comes up usually justifies the same comp as actively working that entire time.

I do. It means that time is not mine to do with as I like. I cannot spontaneously go out of town, nor can I decide to have a few drinks. I cannot start a project that needs to see completion - this includes simply involved dinners, hobby projects, and sometimes home repairs and car maintenance. If it is at night, I have to sacrifice sleep quality for being able to hear the phone. In other words, they are working hour…

Sure, I'm not saying it deserves no compensation.

But e.g. for defense contract stuff, I've accepted 1/4th my normal pay rate to be available for a span of hours (and then 150%, 2 hour minimum to actually do anything).

Yes, I can't drink, or become unreachable, and need to be able to get to a computer within a few minutes. But I can read a book, watch TV, work on hobby projects, etc.

150% for the entire time seems unreasonable.

Re: Being on call sucks

#237

Post by sokoloff »

mlyle wrote: post #235
Broken_Hippo wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do. It means that time is not mine to do with as I like. I cannot spontaneously go out of town, nor can I decide to have a few drinks. I cannot start a project that needs to see completion - this includes simply involved dinners, hobby projects, and sometimes home repairs and car maintenance. If it is at night, I have to sacrifice sleep quality for being able to hear the phone. In other words, they are working hour…

Sure, I'm not saying it deserves no compensation. But e.g. for defense contract stuff, I've accepted 1/4th my normal pay rate to be available for a span of hours (and then 150%, 2 hour minimum to actually do anything). Yes, I can't drink, or become unreachable, and need to be able to get to a computer within a few minutes. But I can read a book, watch TV, work on hobby projects, etc. 150% for the entire time seems un…

Said differently, if the employer is going to pay you overtime rates for the period, why wouldn't they just have you actually work overtime, prioritizing a production outage over regular development, but regular development over watching TV?

Re: Being on call sucks

#238

Post by PeterisP »

niij wrote: post #229
PeterisP wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 withou…

> I don't see how you can declare what an employer/employee are allowed to agree to.

Okay, I am coming from a non-US perspective where it's obvious that you can declare what employer/employee are allowed to agree to - "employee rights" means those things which are unalienable and nonnegotiable.

I'll simply quote the universal declaration of human rights "24. Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay." - not only do countries have the right to intervene in employer/employee contracts, they have a duty to do so. If local employment law permits companies to require salaried employees to work 168 hours a week, then that law is literally enabling violation of human rights and should be changed.

Re: Being on call sucks

#239

Post by mlyle »

sokoloff wrote: post #237
mlyle wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, I'm not saying it deserves no compensation. But e.g. for defense contract stuff, I've accepted 1/4th my normal pay rate to be available for a span of hours (and then 150%, 2 hour minimum to actually do anything). Yes, I can't drink, or become unreachable, and need to be able to get to a computer within a few minutes. But I can read a book, watch TV, work on hobby projects, etc. 150% for the entire time seems un…

Said differently, if the employer is going to pay you overtime rates for the period, why wouldn't they just have you actually work overtime, prioritizing a production outage over regular development, but regular development over watching TV?

Thank you-- this is a very cogent phrasing of the argument.

Re: Being on call sucks

#240

Post by nonameiguess »

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

Pretty normal for government work. My dad was a plumber for LA County, on call pretty frequently to respond to broken pipe emergencies and what not, and got paid an hourly rate on top of normal salary for that, whether he got called in or not. Even as a software developer contractor, when I've worked government contracts, if you're authorized to charge overtime, you do have to actually charge it, and get paid more than your salary, if you work overtime. Otherwise, you're donating labor to an executive agency, which violates the Constitution's granting of exclusive power of the purse to Congress. This is the same basic reason that, if you donate money to the government, you can only donate to the Treasury general fund and not to a specific activity, also why Iran-Contra was illegal (one of many reasons, I suppose).
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