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Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

arthur-johnston.com

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Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#71

Post by pnutjam »

sunaookami wrote: post #51
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?

I was on-call on a Saturday at the start of November and the prod issue took nearly 10 hours. No extra compensation from my company (not required by law in my country for saturdays but come on!). A week later I had to do it Monday night again, still no extra compensation... I can work less with these extra hours but... when?

ah, the ever popular evaporating comp time. If companies prefer that I tell people to be sure to comp your time ASAP. No 50 or 60 hour week heroes.

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#72

Post by cess11 »

Buttons840 wrote: post #23
rk06 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it should be compensated, so Management prioritises fixing issues, instead of adding new bugs

I've wished for a tech workers union for this reason. I don't care about pay, let the union say nothing about pay. But let's align incentives. Any time spent fixing issues on-call is compensated 4-to-1. Workers may accrue compensation time, and any compensation time in excess of 20 hours is paid 10-to-1 when the employee leaves. The idea here isn't for workers to accrue and cash out comp time, but instead to give an…

All you need is three people that agree on one realistic change at your workplace and you have a union. From there you start having regular meetings and plan a strategy for pushing this single issue.

When that's done, chill for a while, do some recruiting and education in the workplace and think about what the next realistic change ought to be.

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#73

Post by Braini »

Seattle3503 wrote: post #47
martin-t wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If they're the owners, do they get all the profit?" When you know you're not gonna work somewhere, might as well have fun raising eyebrows. Cooperatives really should be more common.

I mean it sounds clever, but how do you have engineers with no expertise in a system handling calls for it? I've been at places that follow the sun, and you frequently have no idea what to do during an incident, because the person who owns the system is offline. But at least you can sit one a useless incident call during work hours instead of completing your own tickets I suppose.

There should be SOPs in place for each "expected" issue so people know what to do. Its not like you (should) start debugging and deploying stuff in the middle of your on-call shift anyway. Its not 100% for sure but in the normal case this should be fine.

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#74

Post by alienchow »

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?

Google paid SREs 67% their hourly rate for tier 1 oncall outside business hours, regardless of whether they were paged. So 12h shifts on weekends were a full day's pay. Convertible to Off-in-Lieu. I had so many off days. Not sure if it's still the case after those layoffs.

Anyway, I prefer Mon - Thu, Fri - Sun shifts.

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#77

Post by zgeor »

einichi wrote: post #68
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.

Not to mention that there is incentive to keep having oncall pages, because that's how you get paid. Or not participate at all. On the other hand, with a flat payment, there is a big incentive to prevent issues and not have(reduce) ooh incidents, and participate in the rota.

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#78

Post by sokoloff »

einichi wrote: post #68
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.

As long as the on-call coverage is as specified at the time of hiring, this is just a difference in form of payment.

If I receive 100 total units of compensation, I'd way rather get 100 units of base pay (and 0 on-call pay) than 90 units of base pay and 10 units of specific on-call pay. (What if the company eliminates on-call? What if I get injured and my insurance only covers base pay? Severance is usually based only on base pay; I would not be paid on-call while I'm on PTO or other paid leave, annual raise percentages typically apply to base pay, etc...)

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#79

Post by makeitdouble »

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.

The extra day off is probably equivalent to getting paid ? Last time I had on-call part of the job, I think the pay increase for standby would have amounted to roughly 8h as well (actual interventions were also 150% for regular nights and Saturday, 200% for Saturday night and Sunday)

Lugging around a laptop and the on-call phone when going anywhere, checking every now and then when the phone was not with your for a while (e.g. pool, gym etc), making sure you don't go places with no signal was enough of a PITA that knowing we were paid every hour of that had a nice psychological effect.

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#80

Post by sgarland »

I’ve also done Wednesday to Wednesday, though Tuesday seems better mentally if only because there is one less day after the new week starts.

What is much better, though, is splitting the week into a 4/3 or 5/2 split, with a primary and backup on-call. Primary takes the weekdays, then switches with Backup for the weekend. You’re still sharp and aware of any current issues should the need arise, but the odds of a weekend page are (hopefully) lower, so you can relax a bit.

This of course requires enough people to have a reasonable rotation; 6 at a minimum, but 8 is better.

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