Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday • Hacker News Board

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#61

Post by smasty » Sat, Nov 23, 2024, 10:57 AM UTC

thuanao wrote: post #10

Is anyone getting compensated for being on-call? If you are paged and work outside of business hours, do you receive additional compensation?

Yes, a flat daily fee during the week, and double that during the weekend or public holidays. Comes to ~600€ per week. If you actually get paged, you automatically get time off for the amount of hours you spent dealing with the incident.

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#62

Post by vineyardmike » Sat, Nov 23, 2024, 11:17 AM UTC

bckr wrote: post #28

> But websites need to be up 24/7, cron jobs need to run on the weekend and backend servers need to be up to support both Tech entrepreneurs should give more weight to choosing markets that don’t require this

It used to be somewhat common for websites/services to go down for a few minutes every so often for maintenance/migrations/etc.

Tech entrepreneurs should give no weight to this. The market seems to support engineers doing on-call rotations, and a service that can’t tolerate any downtime is (theoretically) a service that is worth a lot to a lot of people- which is perfect for monetizing.

Tech entrepreneurs should stop giving excessive “nines” of availability. Even 99% is probably enough for most customers to never notice, and significantly easier to engineer than 99.999….

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#63

Post by dijksterhuis » Sat, Nov 23, 2024, 11:18 AM UTC

superfrank wrote: post #20

losteric wrote: post #5

I have occasionally convinced teams to adopt both oncall and sprint cycles aligned with Tuesday [1] - the dev teams all loved it. Management was a harder sell, but by and large were happier with the extra days to communicate results/get metrics before their own Friday deadlines. [1] also Wednesday/Thursdays. Wednesdays were my favorite in good working environments, it felt like running a successful marathon, but it w…

I'm curious why Tues to Tues for sprints was a hard sell to management?

likewise, be interested to hear more about that situation

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#64

Post by kevinventullo » Sat, Nov 23, 2024, 11:38 AM UTC

tdeck wrote: post #11

thuanao wrote: post #10

Is anyone getting compensated for being on-call? If you are paged and work outside of business hours, do you receive additional compensation?

At Google we used to get paid an oncall bonus which was calculated at something like 1/3 your prorated salary for the non-working hours you were oncall (IIRC), up to some limit per quarter. For my team a week of oncall per quarter would max it out and net you a few thousand dollars bonus.

Google still does this. Roughly speaking, hitting the limit in a quarter means you have <= 5 people on the rotation.

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#65

Post by matsemann » Sat, Nov 23, 2024, 11:45 AM UTC

bckr wrote: post #28

> But websites need to be up 24/7, cron jobs need to run on the weekend and backend servers need to be up to support both Tech entrepreneurs should give more weight to choosing markets that don’t require this

An internal service we relied on when working at Norway's biggest government agency had opening hours. If you called it outside 8-17 it wouldn't reply, heh.

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#66

Post by portaouflop » Sat, Nov 23, 2024, 11:45 AM UTC

vineyardmike wrote: post #62

bckr wrote: post #28

> But websites need to be up 24/7, cron jobs need to run on the weekend and backend servers need to be up to support both Tech entrepreneurs should give more weight to choosing markets that don’t require this

It used to be somewhat common for websites/services to go down for a few minutes every so often for maintenance/migrations/etc. Tech entrepreneurs should give no weight to this. The market seems to support engineers doing on-call rotations, and a service that can’t tolerate any downtime is (theoretically) a service that is worth a lot to a lot of people- which is perfect for monetizing. Tech entrepreneurs should stop…

The issue is less giving out excessive SLAs - it’s more that even a tiny ass startup thinks they need high availability and four nines and scale to billions - when in reality almost no one actually needs it. But those are cool engineering problem so we’d rather work on them than on building a business.

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#67

Post by kqr » Sat, Nov 23, 2024, 11:50 AM UTC

bckr wrote: post #28

> But websites need to be up 24/7, cron jobs need to run on the weekend and backend servers need to be up to support both Tech entrepreneurs should give more weight to choosing markets that don’t require this

I agree it's worth considering, but allowing problems on e.g. weekends sets up weird incentives for management everywhere I've been.

For example, they may not want to fix quality issues as long as their consequences can be pushed to the weekend. Or they may start to demand people work weekends to do maintenance.

Or -- worst of all -- they realise they can avoid deployments entirely on weekdays, and then do these big bang deployments on weekends.

This makes engineer's lives miserable but looks like rational optimisation to management.

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#68

Post by einichi » Sat, Nov 23, 2024, 11:56 AM UTC

polack wrote: post #26

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.

No pay for being on call by itself is still poor, particularly when it comes to swapping rotations between team members to provide flexibility amongst each other.

You’re making yourself available 24/7. That has a non trivial lifestyle impact which I’ve always thought deserves more than is typically rewarded.

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#69

Post by oncallthrow » Sat, Nov 23, 2024, 12:05 PM UTC

thuanao wrote: post #10

Is anyone getting compensated for being on-call? If you are paged and work outside of business hours, do you receive additional compensation?

At mine: compensated for being on-call, but it's a pittance (in the 100-200 per week range, which is nowhere near being worth it). We get TOIL for time spent responding to incidents.

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#70

Post by pnutjam » Sat, Nov 23, 2024, 12:09 PM UTC

thuanao wrote: post #10

Is anyone getting compensated for being on-call? If you are paged and work outside of business hours, do you receive additional compensation?

Last job I was compensated a flat $450 for being on call 1 week, on top of my salary in the 140K range. Everybody received the same on-call pay and I'm pretty sure salaries were similar but not identical.