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As an in-demand software engineer with oncall experience at a well-regarded company, I will not consider jobs that require me to be on call. Jobs with oncall d

As an in-demand software engineer with oncall experience at a well-regarded company, I will not consider jobs that require me to be on call. Jobs with oncall don't offer more compensation than jobs that don't. Scheduling my life around being able to answer a page is inconvenient, and waking up in the middle of the night is something I'd rather avoid. Operational work is often not considered as important as feature development for promotions, so you feel like you're wasting your time when doing it. In my experience, system quality is completely independent of whether the developers do oncall or not. But I'd welcome objective data that proves otherwise. There is no upside for me as an individual to take a job with oncall responsibilities.

thesmallestcat 10y ago
Companies need to evaluate the loss of man-days when they demand or even suggest on-call duties for engineers. Also the effect of these duties on number of sick days taken, and overall health. Because when I'm up from 3-3:30am fixing something, I'm going to be less useful and emotionally testy that day at the office. When I'm a Good Marine and am up eyeballing a problem from 1am-6am, the same will happen but over a 1-2 week span. And I'll probably get sick. I really think engineers end up on-call because companies give short shrift to documentation. Maybe if you afforded time to document systems and processes, you could outsource on-call duties, or trust sysadmins to remediate without developer intervention.
Johnny555 10y ago
Operational work is often not considered as important as feature development for promotions, so you feel like you're wasting your time when doing it. Which is why developers need to be on call, otherwise they don't build operational support into apps (monitoring hooks, useful logging, etc) At my company devops is primary on-call, with a developer(s) as backup, if devops can't fix the problem quickly, they escalate to the developer. If they can't reach the developer or the developer can't fix it, then the entire release is rolled back and then the developers bear the brunt of the release schedule changes. Without developers in that loop, it's hard for devops to get the tools they need to diagnose and fix problems.
- maccard 10y ago
  > At my company devops is primary on-call, with a developer(s) as backup Sort of defeats the purpose of Dev ops, if you have a Dev ops team and a Dev team, doesn't it?
  - Johnny555 10y ago
    Does it? Dev Ops is focused more on operations (tooling around releases, monitoring, etc) as well as doing initial triage for system problems to figure out where the problem is, and if they can't fix it themselves, determine which engineering group can help resolve an issue. Most of the Devops staff does development, but more around operational needs, product features are implemented by Dev. Dev Ops means different things to different companies.
    - softawre 10y ago
      Yep. This is how my org does it. DevOps builds automation/tooling to help the operations focused developers on the dev teams do their jobs better.
    - brazzledazzle 10y ago
      I think it's fair to say that you're just ops since you have the exact same functional role. And you can suffer from the same organizational issues that prompted the creation of the devops movement. That said, there's a need for a way to divide the industry between traditional ops people and those with the ability to handle modern infrastructure and develop custom tooling where needed. And for better or worse the industry has decided that "devops" is going to be the way to determine that. Now the problem is all of the fakers (both individuals and teams) adopting the moniker. So now we're back to square one and we actually need to evaluate people and teams based on their knowledge and skill.
      - Johnny555 10y ago
        We're more integrated with Dev than a traditional "ops" role where Dev throws the code over the fence at Ops and says "Deploy it!" and Ops throws it back if there's a problem and says "Fix it!" Our devops team sits in on design and code reviews to help ensure that operational needs are met early on in the process, and we'll change code to fix bugs or support operational needs. We're not full developers and won't rearchitect entire systems, but we will do bug fixes when we can. So now we're back to square one and we actually need to evaluate people and teams based on their knowledge and skill Have we ever left that square?
flax 10y ago
I 100 percent agree. I'm sorry you feel the need to post under a throwaway, but I'll put my name on this to back your point up. On call is a deal breaker for my future job searches, and I am considering leaving the company I just joined because they sprung it on me while never mentioning it in the interview process. On call is justified in my opinion only if someone will die if the problem isn't handled. Or if compensation is dramatically increased and agreed upon in advance.
- softawre 10y ago
  Did you ever ask about it during the interview?
- beachstartup 10y ago
  as someone who runs an on-call team, and is woken up frequently still as a co-founder, if someone sprang that on you, you should quit asap, and tell them why. people need to know that on-call is a decision, not a mandate. the only reason my team puts up with it is because we're 100% remote. they never leave their families, so that's the trade-off.
  - ianai 10y ago
    Grumble grumble. There are times I'm treated as oncall despite being hourly. Figure that out.
    - beachstartup 10y ago
      consultants charge double during on-call hours. it's standard practice.
      - brazzledazzle 10y ago
        Unplanned == big $$. If you have to travel to the customer you can charge double your hourly rate and an emergency trip fee + expenses.
ocdtrekkie 10y ago
As someone occasionally told my job is becoming irrelevant by people here on HN, I hope you folks have some regard for sysadmins who do on call regularly and (likely) get paid drastically less to do it. ;) I've been told here that now developers can and should do everything, but it doesn't seem like a lot of developers want to be called in at 2am.
- toomuchtodo 10y ago
  > As someone occasionally told my job is becoming irrelevant by people here on HN HN is an enormous echo chamber; Take it with a liberal amount of skepticism.
- ownagefool 10y ago
  I think the term developer is a bit loaded. If you're properly developing an application, you should know what your dependies are, where you store your data, what are the failure condiditions are, how to prove your appication is actually functioning. In my world, developers barely understand the programming language or framework they're using and are more interested in using buzzword foo rather than solving the problem at hand or dealing with actually running the systems that solve said problems. As someone who does both dev and ops jobs, together and seperatly, I think your job will be safe for a very long time.
  - all_usernames 10y ago
    "In my world, developers barely understand the programming language or framework they're using and are more interested in using buzzword foo rather than solving the problem at hand or dealing with actually running the systems that solve said problems." Oh, man. A thousand times this. Many devs I work with have been writing code that runs on AWS for years, and don't know what RDS means.
skj 10y ago
I am compensated, beyond normal salary, for every hour of oncall outside of normal working hours, up to a cap of 15% salary.
honkhonkpants 10y ago
"Jobs with oncall don't offer more compensation than jobs that don't." This sounds particular to your experience. There are definitely companies where on-call time is compensated.
- shados 10y ago
  I think its more: Comparing multiple companies, my total yearly income won't be any higher if I pick a company that requires oncall than if I pick one that doesn't, even if the one that requires it compensate for it. I can do the same job at company X for 200k without being on call, 175k at another that requires it, or vice versa...there's no correlation. So if its not obviously worth my time, I just wont' do it.
dmourati 10y ago
Do you write production code?

thesmallestcat 10y ago

Companies need to evaluate the loss of man-days when they demand or even suggest on-call duties for engineers. Also the effect of these duties on number of sick days taken, and overall health. Because when I'm up from 3-3:30am fixing something, I'm going to be less useful and emotionally testy that day at the office. When I'm a Good Marine and am up eyeballing a problem from 1am-6am, the same will happen but over a 1-2 week span. And I'll probably get sick. I really think engineers end up on-call because companies give short shrift to documentation. Maybe if you afforded time to document systems and processes, you could outsource on-call duties, or trust sysadmins to remediate without developer intervention.

Johnny555 10y ago

Operational work is often not considered as important as feature development for promotions, so you feel like you're wasting your time when doing it. Which is why developers need to be on call, otherwise they don't build operational support into apps (monitoring hooks, useful logging, etc) At my company devops is primary on-call, with a developer(s) as backup, if devops can't fix the problem quickly, they escalate to the developer. If they can't reach the developer or the developer can't fix it, then the entire release is rolled back and then the developers bear the brunt of the release schedule changes. Without developers in that loop, it's hard for devops to get the tools they need to diagnose and fix problems.

maccard 10y ago
> At my company devops is primary on-call, with a developer(s) as backup Sort of defeats the purpose of Dev ops, if you have a Dev ops team and a Dev team, doesn't it?
- Johnny555 10y ago
  Does it? Dev Ops is focused more on operations (tooling around releases, monitoring, etc) as well as doing initial triage for system problems to figure out where the problem is, and if they can't fix it themselves, determine which engineering group can help resolve an issue. Most of the Devops staff does development, but more around operational needs, product features are implemented by Dev. Dev Ops means different things to different companies.
  - softawre 10y ago
    Yep. This is how my org does it. DevOps builds automation/tooling to help the operations focused developers on the dev teams do their jobs better.
  - brazzledazzle 10y ago
    I think it's fair to say that you're just ops since you have the exact same functional role. And you can suffer from the same organizational issues that prompted the creation of the devops movement. That said, there's a need for a way to divide the industry between traditional ops people and those with the ability to handle modern infrastructure and develop custom tooling where needed. And for better or worse the industry has decided that "devops" is going to be the way to determine that. Now the problem is all of the fakers (both individuals and teams) adopting the moniker. So now we're back to square one and we actually need to evaluate people and teams based on their knowledge and skill.
    - Johnny555 10y ago
      We're more integrated with Dev than a traditional "ops" role where Dev throws the code over the fence at Ops and says "Deploy it!" and Ops throws it back if there's a problem and says "Fix it!" Our devops team sits in on design and code reviews to help ensure that operational needs are met early on in the process, and we'll change code to fix bugs or support operational needs. We're not full developers and won't rearchitect entire systems, but we will do bug fixes when we can. So now we're back to square one and we actually need to evaluate people and teams based on their knowledge and skill Have we ever left that square?

flax 10y ago

I 100 percent agree. I'm sorry you feel the need to post under a throwaway, but I'll put my name on this to back your point up. On call is a deal breaker for my future job searches, and I am considering leaving the company I just joined because they sprung it on me while never mentioning it in the interview process. On call is justified in my opinion only if someone will die if the problem isn't handled. Or if compensation is dramatically increased and agreed upon in advance.

softawre 10y ago
Did you ever ask about it during the interview?
beachstartup 10y ago
as someone who runs an on-call team, and is woken up frequently still as a co-founder, if someone sprang that on you, you should quit asap, and tell them why. people need to know that on-call is a decision, not a mandate. the only reason my team puts up with it is because we're 100% remote. they never leave their families, so that's the trade-off.
- ianai 10y ago
  Grumble grumble. There are times I'm treated as oncall despite being hourly. Figure that out.
  - beachstartup 10y ago
    consultants charge double during on-call hours. it's standard practice.
    - brazzledazzle 10y ago
      Unplanned == big $$. If you have to travel to the customer you can charge double your hourly rate and an emergency trip fee + expenses.

ocdtrekkie 10y ago

As someone occasionally told my job is becoming irrelevant by people here on HN, I hope you folks have some regard for sysadmins who do on call regularly and (likely) get paid drastically less to do it. ;) I've been told here that now developers can and should do everything, but it doesn't seem like a lot of developers want to be called in at 2am.

toomuchtodo 10y ago
> As someone occasionally told my job is becoming irrelevant by people here on HN HN is an enormous echo chamber; Take it with a liberal amount of skepticism.
ownagefool 10y ago
I think the term developer is a bit loaded. If you're properly developing an application, you should know what your dependies are, where you store your data, what are the failure condiditions are, how to prove your appication is actually functioning. In my world, developers barely understand the programming language or framework they're using and are more interested in using buzzword foo rather than solving the problem at hand or dealing with actually running the systems that solve said problems. As someone who does both dev and ops jobs, together and seperatly, I think your job will be safe for a very long time.
- all_usernames 10y ago
  "In my world, developers barely understand the programming language or framework they're using and are more interested in using buzzword foo rather than solving the problem at hand or dealing with actually running the systems that solve said problems." Oh, man. A thousand times this. Many devs I work with have been writing code that runs on AWS for years, and don't know what RDS means.

skj 10y ago

I am compensated, beyond normal salary, for every hour of oncall outside of normal working hours, up to a cap of 15% salary.

honkhonkpants 10y ago

"Jobs with oncall don't offer more compensation than jobs that don't." This sounds particular to your experience. There are definitely companies where on-call time is compensated.

shados 10y ago
I think its more: Comparing multiple companies, my total yearly income won't be any higher if I pick a company that requires oncall than if I pick one that doesn't, even if the one that requires it compensate for it. I can do the same job at company X for 200k without being on call, 175k at another that requires it, or vice versa...there's no correlation. So if its not obviously worth my time, I just wont' do it.

dmourati 10y ago

Do you write production code?