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> 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 labo

by 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.
vacri 11y ago
On-call has to be a separate, significant financial line item. It can't be just 'rolled into your job' - what happens when you're understaffed, for example? On-call means you can't get drunk, go see a movie, visit distant friends or whatever. It's a significant impact on your life - plus, of course, you're expected to work your normal full day after a hard night. I simply stopped going out to bars with my friends, even though I wasn't drinking. The benefit of socialising didn't make up for standing in a cold alleyway in winter talking an enduser through a tech problem for 45 minutes at a time. "Fuck you, pay me" applies here. Salary is for normal work hours - on-call spreads that to 24/7 for a week. On-call is also not trivial, so it shouldn't pay peanuts. Remember it's the company that wants 24/7 coverage; it should be a cost to the company to provide that. I'm a 'best effort' guy, and I don't like to see my stuff failing. I'd rather fix it on my own time than let it rot until business hours roll around. But I'm not giving my employer priority time over the my personal life for free. If ever you need a question for that part in job interviews, on-call is a good one. Also worth scrutinising in the contract.
- wyclif 11y ago
  Negotiating salary with on-call in view is an important point, and one that is rarely discussed when issues of pay come up. I totally agree that on-call is a cost. If they aren't willing to pay for it, they shouldn't expect employees to do it.

by davedx 11y ago

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.

vacri 11y ago

On-call has to be a separate, significant financial line item. It can't be just 'rolled into your job' - what happens when you're understaffed, for example? On-call means you can't get drunk, go see a movie, visit distant friends or whatever. It's a significant impact on your life - plus, of course, you're expected to work your normal full day after a hard night. I simply stopped going out to bars with my friends, even though I wasn't drinking. The benefit of socialising didn't make up for standing in a cold alleyway in winter talking an enduser through a tech problem for 45 minutes at a time. "Fuck you, pay me" applies here. Salary is for normal work hours - on-call spreads that to 24/7 for a week. On-call is also not trivial, so it shouldn't pay peanuts. Remember it's the company that wants 24/7 coverage; it should be a cost to the company to provide that. I'm a 'best effort' guy, and I don't like to see my stuff failing. I'd rather fix it on my own time than let it rot until business hours roll around. But I'm not giving my employer priority time over the my personal life for free. If ever you need a question for that part in job interviews, on-call is a good one. Also worth scrutinising in the contract.

wyclif 11y ago
Negotiating salary with on-call in view is an important point, and one that is rarely discussed when issues of pay come up. I totally agree that on-call is a cost. If they aren't willing to pay for it, they shouldn't expect employees to do it.