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Is anyone getting compensated for being on-call? If you are paged and work outside of business hours, do you receive additional compensation?
Is anyone getting compensated for being on-call? If you are paged and work outside of business hours, do you receive additional compensation?
If there was an actual incident, you'd get paid as if that was overtime worked, and it depended on when it occurred (e.g. weekends and public holidays carried a higher than normal multiplier). There were also limits on how much rest you'd need to be guaranteed, etc.
On average, our actual incidents were relatively infrequent, and the pay out mostly depended on the size of the team, which dictated how often you got rotated in. It worked out to something like +10% salary though.
We previously had a week long rotation, and some folks were initially skeptical of the idea to change, saying they were worried they'd feel like they were "oncall all the time". But, they agreed to try it for a month. That was a bit over a year ago now, and no complaints.
I think it ends up being a lower stress configuration, because it just becomes part of your normal expected work-week routine, and generally isn't as mentally draining. It does make end of year PTO/holiday time a bit more complex to work out, but so far my team has been okay with that tradeoff.
We do Thursday to Thursday and then you get Friday off after completed on-call. Being on-call gives you no extra pay by itself, but if you get paged off hours and need to work you get paid 150 to 200% of your normal hourly wage depending on what time of day you need to work. Best on-call I’ve had.
Is anyone getting compensated for being on-call? If you are paged and work outside of business hours, do you receive additional compensation?
Is anyone getting compensated for being on-call? If you are paged and work outside of business hours, do you receive additional compensation?
If you got paged you'd get 150% of your hourly pay, per started hour. So if you got pages at 22:00 and again at 3:00 that's three hours of pay, regardless of each issue only taking 5 or 10 minutes to fix.
That's roughly $1000/€950 per week of on-call, plus the hours. You'd have four/five of these per year and you could pick up an extra month of pay per year with the standby pay, plus the hours and maybe pick up another day here and there.
Holidays where normally distributed on a volunteer basis (you'd still get paid, but you opted-in to those days). So maybe I'd be home on New Years, but out on Christmas, so I'd offer to cover Christmas, while another colleague might care more about being able to drink on New Years.
Originally we where almost 50 people handling on-call, so you'd have one week per year, but that's not sustainable, you forget how to handle common issues or how to fill out incident reports and handoff correctly.
The most stupid on-call schedule I ever did was midnight to midnight, every other day... It was only me an my boss. That was incredibly stupid, because you couldn't go out on one day, and the day where you could go out, you had to be careful about having one drink to many.
Is anyone getting compensated for being on-call? If you are paged and work outside of business hours, do you receive additional compensation?
I really wish we'd gotten paid for hours worked rather than TOIL, not for personal preference but because it would have aligned the company's incentives better. We might actually have fixed some of the problems if not doing so cost the business a tangible sum of money.
Still, it was better than working for free.
wrong, oncall shifts should not even exist
When we talk about on-call, we’re not referring to systems like Netflix streaming a major fight for 65 million users, but rather essential infrastructure like healthcare systems, nuclear power plants, military operations, financial markets, and the vast array of SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) systems that monitor and control industrial processes.
These systems are crucial to our safety, economy, and everyday lives, and downtime or failure is not an option.
Before Apple, I worked at Microsoft in the Azure team, where I logged over 2,016 hours of on-call support each year. This involved six 24/7 on-call rotations, each lasting two weeks, with responsibilities alternating between primary and secondary support. While there were certainly tough moments and challenging issues during those rotations, they also provided valuable learning experiences and helped me develop problem-solving skills under pressure.
On-call support is a necessary evil.