Being on call sucks
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Being on call sucks
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Re: Being on call sucks
#2Being on call is the bane of my existence. It’s also entangled with the issue that companies would never consider people working a night shift even tho tons of devs prefer to code at night (and they could actually get things done without constant context switching). How is it that we are expected to be on slack, checking emails, and on call after hours but employers rarely pay for cell phones or after hours labor?
Re: Being on call sucks
#3Being on call is the bane of my existence. It’s also entangled with the issue that companies would never consider people working a night shift even tho tons of devs prefer to code at night (and they could actually get things done without constant context switching). How is it that we are expected to be on slack, checking emails, and on call after hours but employers rarely pay for cell phones or after hours labor?
"I don't have a phone number, it's data only and my house doesn't have good reception" is what a number of ex-colleagues used when asked to be on-call at companies that asked for it, but gave you nothing for it.
For companies that paid you overtime, it often starts with guilt, "well the rest of the team did it last week/month/year, it's your turn". If they don't incentivize you enough to do it, don't do it.
Re: Being on call sucks
#4I manage a team which operates services (among other things) for clients. Our aversion to being on-call drove us to build robust systems, automate the heck out of everything and monitor as much as possible. That allows us to spot issues during the day shift before they become problems for the night shift, so on-call duty became over time a relatively relaxed affair for the team.
Re: Being on call sucks
#5My 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 something it will generally stay fixed.
On top of this, we have a rotation so each of us is only on-call one week out of maybe every four or five. And although I agreed to it mostly because it was a condition of the job and I wanted the job more for learning how the team worked than I cared about the money, the compensation for being on-call is actually pretty good even if nothing happens. And if on-call lands on a holiday, we get the holiday time as vacation days to spend later.
So overall, while I would prefer not to be on-call, I feel like our team implements it about as well as can reasonably be expected. I expected it to drive me crazy, but it actually hasn't yet.
Re: Being on call sucks
#6On-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 with most things, the core idea is not bad, it's the execution that matters.
Re: Being on call sucks
#7On-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.
Re: Being on call sucks
#8On-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.
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.
Re: Being on call sucks
#9Being on call is the bane of my existence. It’s also entangled with the issue that companies would never consider people working a night shift even tho tons of devs prefer to code at night (and they could actually get things done without constant context switching). How is it that we are expected to be on slack, checking emails, and on call after hours but employers rarely pay for cell phones or after hours labor?
Sounds like your issue is with bad managers and bad companies rather than on-call. There are companies out there that cover what you asked for.
Re: Being on call sucks
#10Earlier 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.
Surcharge for on-call activity is an incentive for the organisation to minimise on-call. If I ask my boss for resources to automate operations, he's going to measure that against the cost caused by on-call activity. If there's a flat-rate cost for on-call, the organisation has one incentive less to improve operations and reduce incident count.