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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

#91

Post by larsrc »

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.

+1! You can't travel very much, you can't go hiking or biking in places without cell coverage, your whatever thing you are busy with gets interrupted, you can get woken up in the middle of the night, etc etc. That deserves some compensation.

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#92

Post by harimau777 »

guessmyname wrote: post #60
canergl wrote: post #58

wrong, oncall shifts should not even exist

I agree with the sentiment, but on-call support is an unavoidable necessity given the critical nature of many systems that underpin modern society. When we talk about on-call, we’re not referring to systems like Netflix streaming a major fight for 65 million users, but rather essential infrastructure like healthcare systems, nuclear power plants, military operations, financial markets, and the vast array of SCADA (Su…

Then the people who have to work on call should be compensated accordingly. In my experience they are not.

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#94

Post by tiahura »

strken wrote: post #59
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 my last job I got time off in lieu for actual hours worked + about $4/hour for being on-call. I really wish we'd gotten paid for hours worked rather than TOIL, not for personal preference but because it would have aligned the company's incentives better. We might actually have fixed some of the problems if not doing so cost the business a tangible sum of money. Still, it was better than working for free.

That's the way it was 20-30 years ago. If you were on call, it was informally understood that you were going to be rolling in late in the morning, at if something big happened, you'd be missing a day or two afterwards.

Worked well until E&Y came in and "fixed" things with a strategic plan.

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#95

Post by metaltyphoon »

harimau777 wrote: post #93

On call should be reasonably compensated. IMHO all other discussions of on call should take place after that is resolved. Instead, developers are expected to work unreasonable hours and are then fired when they start to burn out.

Seriously don’t understand why devs want to do free work.

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#96

Post by hnlmorg »

throwaway240403 wrote: post #53

Each person on my team has a day of the week they own, and then we have a rotation for weekends, and negotiate holiday/pto trades. I guess it really only maps correctly for a 5 person team. We previously had a week long rotation, and some folks were initially skeptical of the idea to change, saying they were worried they'd feel like they were "oncall all the time". But, they agreed to try it for a month. That was a b…

how do you work around bank holidays? Which in some countries are almost always on the same weekday? Does the person who has Mondays just deal with not having a longer weekend like everyone else?

What about the person who has Friday? Do they never go out on a Friday evening?

Sounds a nice idea in theory but not all week days are equally inconvenient.

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#97

Post by s1artibartfast »

metaltyphoon wrote: post #95
harimau777 wrote: post #93

On call should be reasonably compensated. IMHO all other discussions of on call should take place after that is resolved. Instead, developers are expected to work unreasonable hours and are then fired when they start to burn out.

Seriously don’t understand why devs want to do free work.

If that is what you think they are want, you are seriously confused.

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#98

Post by dmazin »

A few months ago we switched from Tuesday-through-Monday to Monday-through-Sunday and on call stress decreased.

After a weekend of on call, it sucks to have yet another day of on call on Monday. This overpowered all other reasons (most of them listed in the blog post) for us.

Re: Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday

#99

Post by looperhacks »

I'm not sure if my team is a crazy exception, but here's how our on-call works: We're usually on from Monday-Monday (with exceptions if we say, don't have time on Wednesday or something), but every team decides the time on their own. During work-hours, every team member is responsible for responding to alerts (but usually, only the on-call engineers will carry their company-provided phones and are the first to respond).

Outside work-hours? Most alarms (if they happen) are due to bad alarm configurations. Because nothing ever happens. There was one alert this month, and it was because a randomly generated ID contained the string "ERROR" and was logged due to a warning.

I know that my company isn't the "biggest" (only a few hundred requests per minute) and traffic amount is mostly correlated to usual business hours in my country, so there's just not much happening at night (but never zero traffic). Still, I'm always surprised that other companies seem to have really stressful on-call shifts, because the most annoying part to me is having to carry my laptop if I leave my home for more than 20 minutes.

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