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Developer on Call

henrikwarne.com

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Re: Developer on Call

#241

Post by krzrak »

borghildhedda wrote: post #120
krzrak wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's your point of view. I know lots of developers who don't care about extra days off, they just want the additional $$ for being on call (if there are no issues it's just easy money). The same for the rare occasion they need to handle some issue (night overtime is paid x2). We have an on-call schedule in our dept which is filled up on a voluntary basis. Every time we add new months to it (it's Google spreadsheet),…

I think if companies need to pay with "days off" instead of "money" they would be much more carefull with on-call and have a much greater incentive to make the on-call - not call, proper procedure, taking care of on-call incidents so they don't repeat. They would empower developers to make sure to minimize it so they don't have a penalty of dev-on-vacation. when you have an oncall with fixed payment per hours, you ju…

The incentive is to get paid and don't have any issues to handle. And it works - we rarely have any issues off-hours, and if there are any - we are sure to quickly get rid of the cause, so we can continue to get paid for being on call without actually doing any work.

Re: Developer on Call

#242

Post by badminton1 »

ken wrote: post #105
badminton1 wrote: post #22

Waking up a developer should be done as escalation. If resolving an alert requires to "turn it off and on again" you don't need a developer for that. Stress and lack of sleep reduces cognitive performance (what you pay for when hire a developer) and kills employee morale. If you have 2 similar job offers for similar companies, one requires you to be on-call, the other one doesn't... which one would you pick? If you a…

> If resolving an alert requires to "turn it off and on again" you don't need a developer for that. You need a person to do it, and a developer is-a person. It's funny how our community celebrates stories of startups where they built servers out of Lego and emptied the trash themselves, but can't be bothered to flip a switch ourselves. (Or you could write a program to flip this switch, since that is your profession.)…

If your sleep gets interrupted 5 times the same night because of tech debt you are not allowed to fix, or if you are having dinner with your family and you get paged 3 days in a row, I guarantee you that you will lose your shit.

Re: Developer on Call

#243

Post by sokoloff »

notJim wrote: post #177
_ah wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 averag…

> Right now, software developers have LOTS OF POWER. This is actually not true in my experience. Having a high salary and perks isn't the same as having power. On-call is a perfect example where, AFAIK, it's not the norm to get paid for it (as a developer at least), and if you don't like it, you're free to get a new job. Except the new job will likely have the same policy. There are other work-life examples: for exam…

If you have a high salary and great perks, how sure are you that you're not being paid for it? You don't need a separate line item on your paycheck to reflect the fact that you're paid to go to team meetings, company meetings, or to interview candidates.

My view is that you need to look at the totality of compensation for the totality of responsibilities and decide if the deal is fair or not.

Re: Developer on Call

#244

Post by msla »

ken wrote: post #228
msla wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The software field seems very anti-union, for reasons that I don't entirely understand. A few ideas, not in any specific order: It would kill start-ups, wouldn't it? If you have to obey union rules, you can't have one person who's the DBA and the project lead and the primary programmer and and and because those are all different jobs and require different union employees. Great if you're Microsoft and can afford it…

I suggested one benefit of a union: pay for on-call hours. You've extrapolated from this at least 3 or 4 other rules that I never mentioned, and which I've never heard of, and which make no sense to me. Where is all this coming from? Why would the union rules require separate people for two positions? Why would this be relevant to open source and free software? Why would it be relevant to hobbyists? And so on. I just…

> Whenever I say the word "union", all the complaints I hear against them from programmers sound like straw men.

You refused to understand my post and downvoted to disagree.

Your position is, therefore, refuted by your own dishonesty.

Re: Developer on Call

#245

Post by msla »

_ah wrote: post #154
ken wrote: post #115

There'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 averag…

> 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).

Only if you ignore the fact union members are giving up power to union leaders, who can force them to give money to support political candidates as a condition of employment and who can, as part of a contract, deny them the ability to participate in labor actions if the union leadership disagrees, probably for some profit motive.

Re: Developer on Call

#246

Post by msla »

msla wrote: post #245
_ah wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 averag…

> 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). Only if you ignore the fact union members are giving up power to union leaders, who can force them to give money to support political candidates as a condition of employment and who can, as part of a contract, deny them the ability to participate in la…

Disagreeing by downvoting proves you can't defend your arguments, you know.
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