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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

#81

Post by dangus »

sokoloff wrote: post #78
einichi wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 on…

How can the on-call coverage be specified at hiring? Can the company guarantee that my team will never shrink or that the page rate won't increase?

What will financially encourage my company to stop paging me overnight if there isn't a labor cost to the company every time an on-call incident occurs?

> What if I get injured and my insurance only covers base pay?

Insurance payouts can be easily based on wages that include reported commissions, tips, and overtime. They can very easily be based on an average of past actual wages paid in the last handful of months at the company.

> Severance is usually based only on base pay

Severance is a completely optional practice that is based entirely on what the company wants to do. I would argue that severance is more accurately based on "The lowest safe number to pay to this particular employee to make sure their termination does not become a legal risk."

> I would not be paid on-call while I'm on PTO or other paid leave

But also, PTO days and on-call days don't indersect. If you took time off during an on-call shift you would be trading it with a team member, so you would never lose that extra wage.

Example: I'm taking a week off, it's during my scheduled on-call shift. I would normally get paid my on-call hours but I didn't this week. But when I get back from my vacation, I'm picking up an extra on-call shift because my team member covered my shift when I was on vacation.

Now, I'm taking a week off, but it's not during my on-call shift. I wouldn't have been paid on-call hours this week anyway. When I get back from my vacation, I am going on my normally scheduled on-call shift.

I personally have never felt compensated dynamically enough for on-call schedules. Most corporate jobs seem to pay for a sliver of the life disruption, maybe paying for half my phone and Internet bill or something like that. They all say that the on-call is baked into the compensation, but I'm not so sure.

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#82

Post by nvarsj »

We started a split shift for a really busy oncall and it works out really well. It's Th->Tu, Tu->Th. So basically weekend+2 working days vs 3 working days.

Expectation is you are 100% oncall during the working day, so it works out pretty well between weekend vs non-weekend shifts.

I much prefer the shorter shifts to a full week. A full week on-call usually means delaying important project work, etc. for a full week.

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#83

Post by andrewaylett »

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?

Not that way around, no -- paying extra when paged creates a perverse incentive. We're paid to make ourselves available, and encouraged to take any time we actually spend working out of hours back in lieu.

My team have put a lot of effort into only rarely being paged: a normal week on-call won't have any out-of-hours activity at all.

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#84

Post by sgarland »

kelnos wrote: post #37
losteric wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On my teams, if someone got paged off-hours they would just work less the day after the event. imo it should just be part of the regular salary/work expectations, incentivizing keeping oncall low

Gross, no. This just allows management to ignore problems and push development teams to do feature work, even when everything is on fire and the oncall person is getting paged multiple times per day. Oncall should be compensated, always. The oncall person should get a flat rate just for being on standby, and should also receive a per-page payout, and that amount should be larger if the page happens outside regular bu…

> Or they can decide they are fine with that, and paying the oncall person is a cost of doing business they way they want to.

I was going to say, this would almost certainly be the outcome. Companies have no problem throwing millions at AWS, DataDog, etc. They certainly aren’t going to blink at an employee making a couple hundred bucks extra per day.

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#85

Post by andrewaylett »

wging wrote: post #21
hnbear wrote: post #7

I’ve always been partial for Friday night through Friday night. You start off over the weekend, when you have energy and can survive the two days alone. Ideally no Friday releases so the transition is calm, but as the writer says the batches might fail. You spend the week fixing whatever breaks. You’re cleanly off the Monday to Monday sprint, just doing on-call/ops. You finish Friday evening and immediately get Frida…

Maybe I'm taking you too literally, but I wouldn't want to have a handoff sync-up (or any meeting, really) on a Friday night, nor push that earlier so significant things can happen between sync-up and the actual shift in responsibility from person to person. Friday-to-Friday does sound good. One thing I really liked in a previous job was a split daytime-vs-nighttime rotation. It was well worth a little annoyance to s…

We split in-hours and out-of-hours, and I wouldn't want it any other way. It's especially good if a late night incident keeps you from sleep, because you can take the time back the next morning and let someone else pick up the pieces :).

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#86

Post by sgarland »

N8works wrote: post #4

I never understood why companies didn't simply leverage 24x7 internet MSPs. They are able to staff 24x7 by spreading the cost over multiple customers and working through the process of making your application manageable by a 3rd party is super beneficial. Most of these companies will also do performance monitoring and analysis as well. They see issues and optimization opportunities across multiple applications and kn…

If an MSP can effectively manage your company’s product, then your problems are simple enough to have automated detection and recovery.

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#87

Post by andrewaylett »

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…

We have our sprints start on Tuesdays, and our in-hours on-call also runs Tuesday to Monday. Out of hours on-call starts at 5pm Monday.

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#88

Post by hawaiianbrah »

dangus wrote: post #81
sokoloff wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 on…

How can the on-call coverage be specified at hiring? Can the company guarantee that my team will never shrink or that the page rate won't increase? What will financially encourage my company to stop paging me overnight if there isn't a labor cost to the company every time an on-call incident occurs? > What if I get injured and my insurance only covers base pay? Insurance payouts can be easily based on wages that incl…

> If you took time off during an on-call shift you would be trading it with a team member, so you would never lose that extra wage.

I think this is true in _most cases_, but is not a given. I myself have encountered scenarios where it isn’t true: switching with someone much later in the rotation, only to then end up having to switch again for instance. You could envision a nefarious teammate weaseling out of their fair share with sneaky switches like this, too, though paying for it would maybe incentivize them not to!

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#89

Post by hawaiianbrah »

dangus wrote: post #81
sokoloff wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 on…

How can the on-call coverage be specified at hiring? Can the company guarantee that my team will never shrink or that the page rate won't increase? What will financially encourage my company to stop paging me overnight if there isn't a labor cost to the company every time an on-call incident occurs? > What if I get injured and my insurance only covers base pay? Insurance payouts can be easily based on wages that incl…

Germany (among other countries) has laws around this. My company pays I think 200 euro a day that someone is on call, so my German reports end up making a decent amount in months they have their on call shifts, especially felt when the team is smaller and rotations more frequent!

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#90

Post by achierius »

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.

The point is that the "ownership" used to rhetorically justify the labor of such engineers is not "ownership" at all: it's missing the literal most important aspect, that is the ability to profit proportionally as a project brings in revenue. Literally everything else is included -- the intensity of work, the singular focus, the care and devotion, the expected level of initiative -- but not the part that would most benefit the engineer.

It's just rhetorical trickery.

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