6 ms·

I have a four-week rotation on-call where I work. Pretty much the same workload as discussed in the article with it. Calls and text messages at 3am, can't be mo

by byuu 11y ago

I have a four-week rotation on-call where I work. Pretty much the same workload as discussed in the article with it. Calls and text messages at 3am, can't be more than 15 minutes away from an internet connection (remote desktop software on Android is a godsend.) While it doesn't feel unbearable, and pays fairly well (at least for the area I'm in), it definitely has completely destroyed my sleep schedule. I no longer have anything near a 24-hour clock: I'll sleep for, at most, 3-4 hours at a time, usually twice a day. Those times change rapidly. As a result, many times I'll need to take modafinil to stay awake through regular shifts; coffee isn't nearly enough. The part I dislike the most is that they moved me to a salaried position that pays ~10% less without the on-call overtime bonus. On-call being just "free labor" makes it much more frustrating. "Why not quit?" is the usual: it pays too well, have a mortgage to pay, was described as being less work than it turned out to be in the interview, etc. But it really does make for a terrible work-life balance, and it's a shame people are so eager to accept on-call as "just the way it is to have a good middle-class job." The thing I really don't understand is how they expect you to always be available, no matter what. The human body cannot physically go for seven days with no sleep, at least not without a complete psychotic break-down. Yet there's no sympathy or compassion for this simple biological fact by the higher-ups if you ever sleep through a text message. It would be so much more humane to just have two people on-call each week, each covering a 12-hour window, with 8-hours (+1 lunch) overlapped by their own work schedules. Yes, it's twice the rotation work, but it's 3 hours outside work each day instead of 15, and you could keep a consistent sleep schedule, and have a social life with times untethered to the internet. Even better, hire one more person and cover the full 24-hours staffed. But I get why that'll never happen, at least.

xyzzyz 11y ago
> It would be so much more humane to just have two people on-call each week, each covering a 12-hour window, with 8-hours overlapped by their own work schedules. Just another reason why opening an office in Europe is great for a company at some stage of its growth.
- yummyfajitas 11y ago
  India is a better bet. 10.5 hours away means they are nearly on the opposite schedule, price is better (wages only marginally, but Europe has lots of other costs) and you aren't stuck dealing with insane euro labor laws.
  - krzyk 11y ago
    What labor laws do you find insane?
    - peterfirefly 11y ago
      My guess would be the Mediterranean ones... (+ some de facto laws in other countries within certain sectors dominated by strong unions tightly connected with Socialist parties.)
    - yummyfajitas 11y ago
      I heard the daily complaints from a person attempting to handle restructuring at a major UK bank. Let me emphasize that the restructuring was ordered by parliament, who also happened to own most of the bank. Various difficulties: - Work councils get input in whether you can lay someone off - it's a far cry from at-will employment. - Pretty insane laws surrounding pregnancy - you have give a pregnant woman the option (with no obligation on her part) to return to work a year later. I'm told the best way to survive a restructuring is strategic pregnancy. All told, it was vastly more difficult than the US (where she had come from). I know in France you can only fire for cause. In contrast India is pretty easy. It's a simple trade of money for labour, provided you stay out of the communist states. (Which of course you will if you are hiring devs.) The cost difference is actually only a minor reason to hire here - European devs are highly underpaid, and Indian devs are very much not.
      - lemming 11y ago
        you have give a pregnant woman the option (with no obligation on her part) to return to work a year later. I guess it's all much easier when you can just fire them. I'm told the best way to survive a restructuring is strategic pregnancy. Incredibly, despite this obvious benefit, pregnancy is primarily seen as a good way to have a kid when you want one.
ErrantX 11y ago
I am currently the head of a two person ops team, so we effectively share on-call all the time. In reality as the buck stops with me I am on call constantly. It's a drag and I really wish I hadn't been backed into this corner (partly my fault, partly the company). With that said; my Fiancee is a trainee nurse. She works three thirteen hour shifts a week. Which totally destroys your sleep pattern. Working two thirteen hour days in a row takes you out for a couple of days (she gets in at 9, has about an hour to shower and eat and is in bed for a 5am start). All of this for a wage which is about half of mine. And with the massive responsibility that if she's tired and makes a mistake it's not a computer that dies but an actual person. Puts it in perspective.
- davedx 11y ago
  Yeah, I am constantly amazed and terrified of the kinds of shifts doctors and nurses do. I really do not understand how they manage to not make mistakes in such an environment. In Grey's Anatomy, you often see people taking a couple of hours sleep mid shift; is this generally accurate?
  - eitally 11y ago
    My wife is a nurse, too, and it definitely takes a special kind of person to do this work. She moved into pharma about a dozen years ago to escape the crazy and irregular hours/shifts and has been much happier & less stressed ever since, and much higher pay.
  - chriskanan 11y ago
    My fiance is a child neurology resident in Boston. Last year she was on 28 hour call every 4 days, which means she was forced to stay up at least 30 hours if things were busy at the hospital. Depending on the rotation, she would catch 0-4 hours of sleep at the hospital if it wasn't that busy at night. I think they only make the residents work 28 hour shifts, with attending working more like 9-15 hours per day.
  - rayiner 11y ago
    They do make mistakes. Hospital errors are the third leading cause of death in the U.S.
david-given 11y ago
I have an on-call job. We have two teams, one in Switzerland (where I am), and the other on the west coast of the US; shifts are daytime only, from 0600 to 1800, with the other team handling the night shift. Each team's about five people. I'm usually on call for three or four days in a row once or twice a month. Schedules are flexible. We just enter dates when we're not available into our calendar and this insane piece of inhouse software looks at our oncall history and determines a fair schedule, so everyone gets the same amount of oncall time. It even takes into account weekends (which are typically very quiet, but you still need to be within mobile-signal-or-coffee-shop range). Pager load is typically one or two a day, and are usually fairly trivial; far more annoying are the non-paging alerts and paperwork. Sometimes there's a pager storm as something catches fire and burns down, but there's always someone around to help when that happens. Being on-call here is... never something I look forward to, but the systems are in place to give support if I need it, and I'm never on for very long. The culture here emphasises that when my shift is over, particularly when there's a crisis, I hand over to the next person (in the other team) and then GO HOME, because otherwise I'll burn out.
davedx 11y ago
> The part I dislike the most is that they moved me to a salaried position that pays ~10% less without the on-call overtime bonus. On-call being just "free labor" makes it much more frustrating. Ouch! When our team was asked to be on-call (this was a few years ago at another company), we negotiated a fixed monthly bonus and I don't think we would have continued to be "on-call" if they had reneged on that. I think it was even in our contract. How did they take that away from you? Is it in your job description that you need to be on-call? We also had a high priority "fix what broke" strategy that was also management approved: whenever something went wrong at 3am, the next day our top priority was to try and ensure that did not happen again, ever. Our interests were aligned with management here: management wanted as little downtime as possible for the web services, we wanted as little interruption to sleep as possible. How often do you get calls/messages on average? Is there anything you can do to reduce them by improving the actual things that are breaking?
- byuu 11y ago
  On-call rotation is listed in the job description. We have at-will employment here, so a contract change is basically, "accept the change or go someplace else to work." Which works against us in a down economy in a position that still pays better than most other companies would for the same work. I make around $70k myself. The average here is around $50k. Moving's not really an option due to family. Maybe in 4-5 more years moving will be on the table, but by then I'll be closing in on 40. We probably get around 3-4 calls a week, usually between 1am and 8am (non-staffed hours), and another 6-12 text message alerts a week. Some weeks are better, some are worse. My issue is once I've woken up to handle something, it takes me a good 1-2 hours to fall back asleep again. I obviously can't treat that with sleeping pills since I need to be able to wake up again. So I go the opposite route and try to keep myself awake when I need to be. We can't do much to fix outage issues, as we're part of a larger organization, and we monitor processes for everyone else. It's our job to contact their on-call support staff to get things fixed. I think the idea was to relieve all of the tier-3 teams from needing to implement their own separate, patch-work application health monitoring systems; and instead centralize all of the monitoring to one team. Some of the better teams do have their own health monitoring as well; and in those cases, we're more of the "fallback" in case their monitoring doesn't catch issues.
lrvick 11y ago
You CAN quit. We are in an industry where you have to dodge recruiters trying to tackle you on your way to get coffee if you have any technical skill. Recruiters that represent companies capable of paying your mortgage and some probably well needed vacations. Personally I have folded companies, quit jobs, and turned away opprotunities that represented substantially more than I make now. People have called these choices foolish but my life honestly rocks right now. Today I am happy, productive at a job I enjoy, and have time to spend with the people that matter, so who cares what other people consider logical? Optimize for work-life balance, not bank account balance.
- vonmoltke 11y ago
  > You CAN quit. We are in an industry where you have to dodge recruiters trying to tackle you on your way to get coffee if you have any technical skill. Recruiters that represent companies capable of paying your mortgage and some probably well needed vacations. Some of us can quit. Amazon employees in Seattle are probably in a better position than most in this respect, but many people in this industry are not so lucky.
- hwstar 11y ago
  Optimize for a balance of work-life balance and bank account balance. You need both.
- ryandrake 11y ago
  Your assessment of the tech employment market is overly rosy. OP can quit and possibly find another tech job. Chances are, it won't be noticeably different from his/her current job in terms of working conditions, compensation, or benefits. Of course there are rare outlier counter-examples, just in case someone wants to "prove" me wrong.
  - lrvick 11y ago
    And yours seems overly pessimistic. "I got burned by one man/woman/job so all men/women/jobs are the same. Why bother?" You bother because getting it right is worth it, and when you do you won't regret having a few failed attempts getting there. It is a big world with a lot of positive opprotunities. Go find yours :)
adekok 11y ago
> Even better, hire one more person and cover the full 24-hours staffed. But I get why that'll never happen, at least. Because it's cheaper to burn out your existing employees, fire them for non-performance, and then hire (and lie to) new employees who don't know what's going on. The problem here is "on call". Why not "on duty"? If I'm getting paid for the midnight shift one week out of four, that's annoying, but manageable. If I'm getting paid for 40 hours a week, but I'm "on call" 24/7, 365 days a year, that's abusive.
- Brian-Puccio 11y ago
  In the US, that's the big difference between exempt and non-exempt. I'm glad I have a lower, less prestigious job because it's classified as non-exempt. That means if I'm on call, I'm paid for it. Which means the company really has to think "is it worth having this guy sit around in case something breaks?". It also means company policy prohibits me from having a company cell with email access, because I shouldn't be working off the clock. This lets me work on many side projects because at 5:00p, I'm done. If they need me to do more, they pay me more. I won't say the system is perfect, but when the company incurs a cost for being legally obligated to pay more for more work, I think the employment social contract becomes more fair. Aside from top level executives (CEO, etc.), I'm not exactly sure I can find a reason that people should be classified as exempt. Lawyers and doctors are the often cited examples of exempt employees. Sorry, if an attorney spends a few more hours one week on trial prep, his firm is billing for it, so pay him/her more. Similarly, if a surgeon's operation goes sideways and ends up taking two hours more, pay him/her more. If the idea that any labor past 40 hours in a week was "free labor" for a company was discarded (or better yet, actually cost the company more than the first 40 hours, i.e., "overtime"), we could reduce the number of people who are working more than 40 hours per week and start hiring more unemployed people. On a micro-scale, does it make sense to have 4 people consistently working 50 hours each with 1 unemployed person, or does it make more sense to have 5 people consistently working 40 hours per week? While you're at it, maybe 35 (or 30?) is the new 40? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time#Gradual_decrease_in_working_hours https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time#Gradual_decrease_...
  - 11y ago
joesmo 11y ago
On-call is not the norm, nor to be expected. I've worked over a dozen jobs easily in this industry and not a single one has had an on-call requirement for any amount of time, let alone throughout the night. This will not be the case as much for ops people, but even then it's possible to find jobs that don't have an on-call requirement. Your mistake is thinking this is expected and putting up with it. Sleep is my most precious asset and to be on call 24/7, even once a month, would require at least a 50% raise for me. Though I have to say, if I was in your position and had a job lined up, I'd definitely wait until you were paged at 3am and respond by quitting. Seems like the only just way to go ...

by byuu 11y ago

xyzzyz 11y ago

> It would be so much more humane to just have two people on-call each week, each covering a 12-hour window, with 8-hours overlapped by their own work schedules. Just another reason why opening an office in Europe is great for a company at some stage of its growth.

yummyfajitas 11y ago
India is a better bet. 10.5 hours away means they are nearly on the opposite schedule, price is better (wages only marginally, but Europe has lots of other costs) and you aren't stuck dealing with insane euro labor laws.
- krzyk 11y ago
  What labor laws do you find insane?
  - peterfirefly 11y ago
    My guess would be the Mediterranean ones... (+ some de facto laws in other countries within certain sectors dominated by strong unions tightly connected with Socialist parties.)
  - yummyfajitas 11y ago
    I heard the daily complaints from a person attempting to handle restructuring at a major UK bank. Let me emphasize that the restructuring was ordered by parliament, who also happened to own most of the bank. Various difficulties: - Work councils get input in whether you can lay someone off - it's a far cry from at-will employment. - Pretty insane laws surrounding pregnancy - you have give a pregnant woman the option (with no obligation on her part) to return to work a year later. I'm told the best way to survive a restructuring is strategic pregnancy. All told, it was vastly more difficult than the US (where she had come from). I know in France you can only fire for cause. In contrast India is pretty easy. It's a simple trade of money for labour, provided you stay out of the communist states. (Which of course you will if you are hiring devs.) The cost difference is actually only a minor reason to hire here - European devs are highly underpaid, and Indian devs are very much not.
    - lemming 11y ago
      you have give a pregnant woman the option (with no obligation on her part) to return to work a year later. I guess it's all much easier when you can just fire them. I'm told the best way to survive a restructuring is strategic pregnancy. Incredibly, despite this obvious benefit, pregnancy is primarily seen as a good way to have a kid when you want one.

ErrantX 11y ago

I am currently the head of a two person ops team, so we effectively share on-call all the time. In reality as the buck stops with me I am on call constantly. It's a drag and I really wish I hadn't been backed into this corner (partly my fault, partly the company). With that said; my Fiancee is a trainee nurse. She works three thirteen hour shifts a week. Which totally destroys your sleep pattern. Working two thirteen hour days in a row takes you out for a couple of days (she gets in at 9, has about an hour to shower and eat and is in bed for a 5am start). All of this for a wage which is about half of mine. And with the massive responsibility that if she's tired and makes a mistake it's not a computer that dies but an actual person. Puts it in perspective.

davedx 11y ago
Yeah, I am constantly amazed and terrified of the kinds of shifts doctors and nurses do. I really do not understand how they manage to not make mistakes in such an environment. In Grey's Anatomy, you often see people taking a couple of hours sleep mid shift; is this generally accurate?
- eitally 11y ago
  My wife is a nurse, too, and it definitely takes a special kind of person to do this work. She moved into pharma about a dozen years ago to escape the crazy and irregular hours/shifts and has been much happier & less stressed ever since, and much higher pay.
- chriskanan 11y ago
  My fiance is a child neurology resident in Boston. Last year she was on 28 hour call every 4 days, which means she was forced to stay up at least 30 hours if things were busy at the hospital. Depending on the rotation, she would catch 0-4 hours of sleep at the hospital if it wasn't that busy at night. I think they only make the residents work 28 hour shifts, with attending working more like 9-15 hours per day.
- rayiner 11y ago
  They do make mistakes. Hospital errors are the third leading cause of death in the U.S.

david-given 11y ago

I have an on-call job. We have two teams, one in Switzerland (where I am), and the other on the west coast of the US; shifts are daytime only, from 0600 to 1800, with the other team handling the night shift. Each team's about five people. I'm usually on call for three or four days in a row once or twice a month. Schedules are flexible. We just enter dates when we're not available into our calendar and this insane piece of inhouse software looks at our oncall history and determines a fair schedule, so everyone gets the same amount of oncall time. It even takes into account weekends (which are typically very quiet, but you still need to be within mobile-signal-or-coffee-shop range). Pager load is typically one or two a day, and are usually fairly trivial; far more annoying are the non-paging alerts and paperwork. Sometimes there's a pager storm as something catches fire and burns down, but there's always someone around to help when that happens. Being on-call here is... never something I look forward to, but the systems are in place to give support if I need it, and I'm never on for very long. The culture here emphasises that when my shift is over, particularly when there's a crisis, I hand over to the next person (in the other team) and then GO HOME, because otherwise I'll burn out.

davedx 11y ago

> The part I dislike the most is that they moved me to a salaried position that pays ~10% less without the on-call overtime bonus. On-call being just "free labor" makes it much more frustrating. Ouch! When our team was asked to be on-call (this was a few years ago at another company), we negotiated a fixed monthly bonus and I don't think we would have continued to be "on-call" if they had reneged on that. I think it was even in our contract. How did they take that away from you? Is it in your job description that you need to be on-call? We also had a high priority "fix what broke" strategy that was also management approved: whenever something went wrong at 3am, the next day our top priority was to try and ensure that did not happen again, ever. Our interests were aligned with management here: management wanted as little downtime as possible for the web services, we wanted as little interruption to sleep as possible. How often do you get calls/messages on average? Is there anything you can do to reduce them by improving the actual things that are breaking?

byuu 11y ago
On-call rotation is listed in the job description. We have at-will employment here, so a contract change is basically, "accept the change or go someplace else to work." Which works against us in a down economy in a position that still pays better than most other companies would for the same work. I make around $70k myself. The average here is around $50k. Moving's not really an option due to family. Maybe in 4-5 more years moving will be on the table, but by then I'll be closing in on 40. We probably get around 3-4 calls a week, usually between 1am and 8am (non-staffed hours), and another 6-12 text message alerts a week. Some weeks are better, some are worse. My issue is once I've woken up to handle something, it takes me a good 1-2 hours to fall back asleep again. I obviously can't treat that with sleeping pills since I need to be able to wake up again. So I go the opposite route and try to keep myself awake when I need to be. We can't do much to fix outage issues, as we're part of a larger organization, and we monitor processes for everyone else. It's our job to contact their on-call support staff to get things fixed. I think the idea was to relieve all of the tier-3 teams from needing to implement their own separate, patch-work application health monitoring systems; and instead centralize all of the monitoring to one team. Some of the better teams do have their own health monitoring as well; and in those cases, we're more of the "fallback" in case their monitoring doesn't catch issues.

lrvick 11y ago

You CAN quit. We are in an industry where you have to dodge recruiters trying to tackle you on your way to get coffee if you have any technical skill. Recruiters that represent companies capable of paying your mortgage and some probably well needed vacations. Personally I have folded companies, quit jobs, and turned away opprotunities that represented substantially more than I make now. People have called these choices foolish but my life honestly rocks right now. Today I am happy, productive at a job I enjoy, and have time to spend with the people that matter, so who cares what other people consider logical? Optimize for work-life balance, not bank account balance.

vonmoltke 11y ago
> You CAN quit. We are in an industry where you have to dodge recruiters trying to tackle you on your way to get coffee if you have any technical skill. Recruiters that represent companies capable of paying your mortgage and some probably well needed vacations. Some of us can quit. Amazon employees in Seattle are probably in a better position than most in this respect, but many people in this industry are not so lucky.
hwstar 11y ago
Optimize for a balance of work-life balance and bank account balance. You need both.
ryandrake 11y ago
Your assessment of the tech employment market is overly rosy. OP can quit and possibly find another tech job. Chances are, it won't be noticeably different from his/her current job in terms of working conditions, compensation, or benefits. Of course there are rare outlier counter-examples, just in case someone wants to "prove" me wrong.
- lrvick 11y ago
  And yours seems overly pessimistic. "I got burned by one man/woman/job so all men/women/jobs are the same. Why bother?" You bother because getting it right is worth it, and when you do you won't regret having a few failed attempts getting there. It is a big world with a lot of positive opprotunities. Go find yours :)

adekok 11y ago

> Even better, hire one more person and cover the full 24-hours staffed. But I get why that'll never happen, at least. Because it's cheaper to burn out your existing employees, fire them for non-performance, and then hire (and lie to) new employees who don't know what's going on. The problem here is "on call". Why not "on duty"? If I'm getting paid for the midnight shift one week out of four, that's annoying, but manageable. If I'm getting paid for 40 hours a week, but I'm "on call" 24/7, 365 days a year, that's abusive.

Brian-Puccio 11y ago
In the US, that's the big difference between exempt and non-exempt. I'm glad I have a lower, less prestigious job because it's classified as non-exempt. That means if I'm on call, I'm paid for it. Which means the company really has to think "is it worth having this guy sit around in case something breaks?". It also means company policy prohibits me from having a company cell with email access, because I shouldn't be working off the clock. This lets me work on many side projects because at 5:00p, I'm done. If they need me to do more, they pay me more. I won't say the system is perfect, but when the company incurs a cost for being legally obligated to pay more for more work, I think the employment social contract becomes more fair. Aside from top level executives (CEO, etc.), I'm not exactly sure I can find a reason that people should be classified as exempt. Lawyers and doctors are the often cited examples of exempt employees. Sorry, if an attorney spends a few more hours one week on trial prep, his firm is billing for it, so pay him/her more. Similarly, if a surgeon's operation goes sideways and ends up taking two hours more, pay him/her more. If the idea that any labor past 40 hours in a week was "free labor" for a company was discarded (or better yet, actually cost the company more than the first 40 hours, i.e., "overtime"), we could reduce the number of people who are working more than 40 hours per week and start hiring more unemployed people. On a micro-scale, does it make sense to have 4 people consistently working 50 hours each with 1 unemployed person, or does it make more sense to have 5 people consistently working 40 hours per week? While you're at it, maybe 35 (or 30?) is the new 40? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time#Gradual_decrease_in_working_hours https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time#Gradual_decrease_...
- 11y ago

joesmo 11y ago

On-call is not the norm, nor to be expected. I've worked over a dozen jobs easily in this industry and not a single one has had an on-call requirement for any amount of time, let alone throughout the night. This will not be the case as much for ops people, but even then it's possible to find jobs that don't have an on-call requirement. Your mistake is thinking this is expected and putting up with it. Sleep is my most precious asset and to be on call 24/7, even once a month, would require at least a 50% raise for me. Though I have to say, if I was in your position and had a job lined up, I'd definitely wait until you were paged at 3am and respond by quitting. Seems like the only just way to go ...