> People on call should get paid extra for it. Lol does anyone here get paid extra for being on call?
Yep, I too had similar reaction. Operations & Support is part of the S/W developer role in the current generation.
Developer on Call
151–160 of 246 posts
Re: Developer on Call
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the US we call employment contracts "employment agreements", and we don't tend to think of them as contracts, even though they're legally enforceable as contracts. One of the weird things about living here.
They are absolutely contracts and people who don't treat them as such are just asking for trouble. I don't care what an employer tries to call it. Anything that has legal language and they're expecting me to sign my name on it is a legal contract and I treat it as such.
Every such paper I have received has explicitly noted the following, paraphrased:
- This is not a contract; any contract with us must be signed by the CEO. (Paper is not signed by the CEO.)
- You are an "at will" employee. The employment relationship may be ended at any time, by any party, for any reason, or no reason at all. There are no notice requirements, and any and all obligations of one party to the other are severed at the moment of separation.
- We may change the terms and conditions of your employment at any time. If you don't like it, you are free to leave.
As employment "contracts" go, these were slightly less useful to me than a roll of toilet paper.
Re: Developer on Call
#153I was on call 10 years for lottery systems and usally got a call a week sometime during the nite that involved doing a c hotfix or restore some state and rerun a process as systems had to be ready next morning. We got 20% of salary after working hours and 30% weekends and vacation. The last few years I was alone 24/7/365 as people left with stress and as it took 3-5 years to be trusted with this and we hadent prepared anyone. and in the end my new boss told me he wasent paid to being escalated to and after I raised the issue for 3 months I had enough and quit.
Re: Developer on Call
#154There's a lot of words, in the article and the comments, about being compensated for on-call time. The software field seems very anti-union, for reasons that I don't entirely understand. Protecting your time is one feature that unions offer. Want to be paid for every hour you're on call? Get the union to put it in their rules for employers. The alternative we have now is that each developer is responsible for negotia…
A union is a mechanism by which a class of people with less power (typically workers) pool together to enforce rules on people with more power (typically employers).
Right now, software developers have LOTS OF POWER. Companies are constantly courting devs, offering very high salaries, and including incredible perks that simply aren't available in most other industries. Yes, some engineers are exploited, but on average the power lies with the employees.
When you think of all the "union overhead": voting on contracts, complying to work rules, occasionally going on strike, there just isn't enough pain to make that worth it. Yes, I might work too much overtime and go on call at bad hours, but I can also leave and get a new job relatively quickly, and get paid a lot to work in a climate-controlled environment with free drinks and food.
A real software union will arise if and only if it becomes necessary. If somehow everyone is automated out of a job and the few engineers left feel that their very existence is at risk, and the few employers remaining ruthlessly exploit those engineers for minimal pay and benefits, THEN people will fight back (and a union is one possible strategy for this fight). Until then it's a waste of effort.
Re: Developer on Call
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's exactly a reason why a company should consider having their engineers do support - by the sound of it, there's a support department who - MAYBE - accumulate common questions and send them to a product owner, but in practice they won't and in practice the PO ignores it because there's more important things - in his/her mind - that have precedence.
Pro tip: have your managers do customer support .
That would be nice, except most are simply incapable. They forward the requests to the dev team, causing interruptions, distractions, and aggravating engineers.
Re: Developer on Call
#156Here's how my company does it: - $200 for being available for the week. Must be within 1hr of the office should the call require you to come in to use special equipment - All calls first are screened by our Sales team: "Can this wait until business hours tomorrow? There is a substantial call out fee" - 1hr minimum for phone support - 3hr minimum for us logging in with our laptops - 1.5x rate for calls during "days" (…
This is a pretty good system that I think I would be happy working under. My only question is, is it possible to game the system? Meaning, deploy some sloppy code or config the week you know you're on call so you get a few extra 2.0x stints @ 3 hours a piece (on other words, try to manufacture your lazy Sunday Netflix scenario)?
If you always write buggy code right before your on-call weekend, your colleagues might start to notice...
Re: Developer on Call
#157Kayak.com co-founder Paul English on this topic (2010): "The engineers and I handle customer support. When I tell people that, they look at me like I'm smoking crack. They say, "Why would you pay an engineer $150,000 to answer phones when you could pay someone in Arizona $8 an hour?" If you make the engineers answer e-mails and phone calls from the customers, the second or third time they get the same question, they'…
>the second or third time they get the same question, they'll actually stop what they're doing and fix the code.
This is great for actual issues, but what about the genuinely stupid questions? Or the customers who basically just refuse to read the Help section before contacting customer support? From my experience working in support, there are a fair amount of those. And those just seem like a waste of the engineers' time.
Re: Developer on Call
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
They are absolutely contracts and people who don't treat them as such are just asking for trouble. I don't care what an employer tries to call it. Anything that has legal language and they're expecting me to sign my name on it is a legal contract and I treat it as such.
Every such paper I have received has explicitly noted the following, paraphrased: - This is not a contract; any contract with us must be signed by the CEO. (Paper is not signed by the CEO.) - You are an "at will" employee. The employment relationship may be ended at any time, by any party, for any reason, or no reason at all. There are no notice requirements, and any and all obligations of one party to the other are…
I guess that makes sense. I've worked for a lot of small companies, though, so most of these I've signed have also been signed by the CEO. I wouldn't be surprised if they tried to treat it like a contract if they wanted to use it against you in court, though.
Re: Developer on Call
#159Re: Developer on Call
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
Like, I can appreciate that things can always be worse. But the other perspective is that what you're describing is objectively bad. And less of a bad thing is still bad. If I have to option to not do a bad thing (even if it is only minimally bad), then why shouldn't I pursue that option? If you don't mind doing the bad thing, then you should definitely take advantage of that. But probably shouldn't try to convince o…
"Objective" is a pretty slippery word. It's all about context. I'm glad I had that job and worked under those conditions, and I'm glad I left when I did. It was a good thing for me at the start, but then it got old.
Bad things can work out for your own personal good. Or even the good of the whole of society. However, that doesn't make them not bad.
I'm glad that your situation worked out for your own personal good. Nice things happening to people make me happy. Things working out for people make me happy. However, the situation you describe is the latter not the former. That your bad situation, which ultimately worked out for you, did not personally bother you enough to be problematic (for you personally) doesn't make it a good situation. I'm glad that it didn't bother you. However, it may have bothered someone else.
Your situation was objectively bad not because it bothered or didn't bother you or another person. Your situation was bad because it was the result of a powerful entity externalizing their failures onto weak entities.
A manufacturing plant that has the ability to setup logistics to keep a plant running 24/7 is a powerful entity. A manufacturing plant that is able to support jobs for at least three different engineering disciplines (chemical, mechanical, electrical) is a powerful entity.
A powerful entity is able to hire additional staff to handle non-working-hour emergencies. That they didn't hire this staff was their failure.
But that's okay, they don't have to pay for this failure because they can force their employees to pick up their failure by working extra hours. The employees are weak entities because they do not have the ability to decline an encroachment of their working lives into their personal lives.
They could be sleeping, or eating, or spending time with their families, or spending time on hobbies, or spending time innovating with their discipline. All things which help society and the economy. But instead that time has been stolen to make money for something that already has plenty.