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How can I get my engineers to accept being on call?

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Re: How can I get my engineers to accept being on call?

#71

Post by theshrike79 »

Over here the standard usually is 50% hourly pay for being on-call. On-call requires you to be 15-30 minutes away from whatever you can use to fix issues, usually work laptop + internet connection. Oh and you need to be sober (...enough to answer the phone while sounding sober =)

As soon as something happens, you jump to regular overtime pay so if it's on a weekend+Sunday, you're making around 200-300% pay. If it's just after others logged off, you're getting normal pay, maybe 50% extra depending on the company.

I know a lot of people who have paid off loans just by hogging all the on-call hours they can. It's not especially hard if the playbooks are well made and nothing goes horribly wrong.

Re: How can I get my engineers to accept being on call?

#72

Post by karmakaze »

The times I've been on-call as a sr backend dev, my compensation was one of

- $700 for any week that I was on call (whether or not there were any incidents, and more often than not there were none)

- paid my phone bill, roughly $100/mo (including data + amortized phone cost)

- free to take off the next day any time I'm paged off-hours.

There have been other times I was unofficially on-call (at small startups/companies) with no compensation, but I don't think there was enough scale/frequency for it to be a sticking point.

Re: How can I get my engineers to accept being on call?

#73

Post by morelisp »

Silhouette wrote: post #65
munchler wrote: post #46

Another unspoken red flag is that this app is having so many bugs in production that it requires constant attention from its developers. How are all these bugs getting past QA? Is there a legit development process in place? Who is signing off on such buggy software?

This is what always gets me about these on-call discussions. It's like there is some kind of Stockholm syndrome thing going on where employees hired to write software are forced into working under completely different conditions to what software development should require and no-one ever stops to ask how badly you have screwed up the whole company culture for this issue to be relevant at all. I recommend investing in…

Assuming everyone can just "have an operations team running 24/7" out the gate is also a bubble.

Anyway, lots of jobs with variable demand (doctors, vets, supers, utility workers, etc.) work on a fixed / % of salary daily rate + time-and-a-half when activated. What I agree is bullshit is TFA though, if it's not in your contract, don't do it.

Re: How can I get my engineers to accept being on call?

#74

Post by karmakaze »

kelnos wrote: post #55
lambdasquirrel wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see two solutions to the conundrum. At one company where I previously worked, they required that employees receive 2x the time off, if you had to fix or work on anything during off-hours. Another company I’ve been at is pretty strict about not shipping things until they’re ready (but, that company doesn’t hire juniors in engineering). Pick your poison. The fact is that no engineer wants to get paged. But we have to…

Sure, and "constructing that system" should mean paying your employees for non-work-hours work. And even if I never get paged, if I need to be within 15 minutes of a computer with an internet connection at all times, that is going to drastically limit what I can do with my free time. I should be compensated for that. One company I worked at didn't have a formal policy of giving people time off if they got paged, but…

This is an excellent point. I do recall that did on occasion alter my plans, inappropriately bring my laptop to functions, or limit my alcohol consumption for the evening just-in-case. Fortunately we were given generous on-call compensation even when not paged.

Re: How can I get my engineers to accept being on call?

#75

Post by antisthenes »

jki275 wrote: post #64
hosteur wrote: post #10

Easy. Pay them a decent salary for every hour they are on call. Simple as that.

As another reply said, you can't afford me. I did on call 24/7/365 for 23 years. I'll never do it again. My phone goes silent in the evening and doesn't come online again until I get up to come to work. That's never going to change. I'm not 20 anymore, I don't function on no sleep.

> I did on call 24/7/365 for 23 years.

I hope you made enough money to retire comfortably. That sounds like utter hell.

Re: How can I get my engineers to accept being on call?

#76

Post by UtopiaPunk »

kelnos wrote: post #55
lambdasquirrel wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see two solutions to the conundrum. At one company where I previously worked, they required that employees receive 2x the time off, if you had to fix or work on anything during off-hours. Another company I’ve been at is pretty strict about not shipping things until they’re ready (but, that company doesn’t hire juniors in engineering). Pick your poison. The fact is that no engineer wants to get paged. But we have to…

Sure, and "constructing that system" should mean paying your employees for non-work-hours work. And even if I never get paged, if I need to be within 15 minutes of a computer with an internet connection at all times, that is going to drastically limit what I can do with my free time. I should be compensated for that. One company I worked at didn't have a formal policy of giving people time off if they got paged, but…

Agreed! I don't work at a job that requires on-call hours, but I do have to sit in front of a computer 40 hours a week. My job is fine, but I can enthusiastically say that when I am off work, I want to be far away from my computer. If I were looking at a job offer that required on-call time, it would have come with well defined time periods and extra pay.

Re: How can I get my engineers to accept being on call?

#77

Post by andrewaylett »

anotherhue wrote: post #60
andrewaylett wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I much prefer the incentives around time off in lieu for working out of hours, rather than elevated pay. We are paid a base rate just for being on call, it's less than our normal rate and the same for anyone in the company who goes on-call. It's payment for making ourselves available, not for doing any work. If I'm up in the night, I'll want a lie in the next morning.

I find the 'in lieu' method breaks down when one day is not equivalent to another. A Sunday with family that I lose isn't something a Monday on my own can replace. Then again the employer could just let the employee decide which one they want.

That might be a problem in theory, but it's not been a problem in practice for me. I've been on an on-call rota with my current employer for seven years or so, and it's never happened that I've lost even a significant fraction of a weekend. Stuff tends to break while folk are working and making changes, and I've lost evenings to serious outages. Issues out of hours tend to be solved by a roll-back, or a mitigation (like draining a region) that lets us leave the fix until regular working hours.

Probably the most severely interrupted non-working day was when I needed to take an hour between the main couse and pudding one Christmas day, when I was second line on-call and the person who was formally on-call (who doesn't celebrate) needed a second pair of eyes. While the most severely-interrupted working day was probably the one that included this outage: https://medium.com/@SkyscannerEng/how-a-couple-of-characters.... I'm quite proud of the response to that, especially that we quite carefully and deliberately stopped after one region was back up, running in a degraded state overnight in order to make sure we didn't burn out our teams by trying to do too much out of hours.

Re: How can I get my engineers to accept being on call?

#78

Post by joshka »

This feels like a possible troll.

Also by the same person: I work from home as a software engineer and my job is happy with my performance. But I'm putting in little effort. Am I a bad person or employee? [1]

---

I used to be a Senior Software Engineer at another company but recently I took a lower level 2 position at another company remotely. I am very good at what I do. I can usually take a well groomed agile story in any tech stack and complete it way ahead of schedule. The company always praises me for this.

But the truth is they cannot keep me busy. I know I can help out else where but my output is already so very high, especially compared to everyone else.

So instead I just sit around all day playing video games while I wait for my next work assignment. This can sometimes be days or even a week. I don't go looking for it. I have so much free time on hands that I am seriously considering getting a 2nd full time software engineering job remotely and doing this all over again.

No one is the wiser.

Does this make a bad person or employee?

[1]: https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/91282/i-work-...

Re: How can I get my engineers to accept being on call?

#79

Post by andrewaylett »

anotherhue wrote: post #57
andrewaylett wrote: post #52

Incentives are important -- unlike other commentators, I agree with my management that paying extra for time spent actually working when on-call is not a great idea: it sets up a perverse incentive. We have a base hourly rate for on-call (with a half-hour response time) and time off in lieu for actual call-outs. Teams differ, but my team has separate rotas for in-hours and out-of-hours. This means that if you're up a…

> So long as I've got mobile coverage, I'm free to get on with my life. I don't doubt this, but surely you can agree many people lead lives which they would not be free to live in this arrangement? Putting children to bed. Driving somewhere. Cooking. Going to a bar...

I do all of those things. And yes, I know it's frustrating not to be able to enjoy a drink but that's one of the things we're being paid to compensate for. The others are all possible while on-call, especially when I'm justified in not expecting to be called out.

I've also dropped off the on-call rota, and encouraged others to do the same, to care for very young children or family who need care that would be compromised by responding to a page. Or vice-versa, of course: if I've already been up half the night looking after a newborn then I'm not going to be much help. My contract doesn't oblige me to be on-call, I wouldn't do it if the compensation didn't make it worthwhile.

Re: How can I get my engineers to accept being on call?

#80

Post by MollyRealized »

joshka wrote: post #78

This feels like a possible troll. Also by the same person: I work from home as a software engineer and my job is happy with my performance. But I'm putting in little effort. Am I a bad person or employee? [1] --- I used to be a Senior Software Engineer at another company but recently I took a lower level 2 position at another company remotely. I am very good at what I do. I can usually take a well groomed agile story…

Well-noted.
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