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Here's an idea: pay extra for on-call work. As a professional I want to fix stuff if I break it, but there's a limit to demands on my time. It's especially inf

Here's an idea: pay extra for on-call work. As a professional I want to fix stuff if I break it, but there's a limit to demands on my time. It's especially infuriating to spend an evening away from my family to fix a problem that someone else caused and could have fixed in 5 minutes, but I had to spend several hours getting familiar with. At this point, if management asked me to start on an on-call rotation I'd want to know how I was going to be compensated for the additional time and opportunity cost of being on call, or I'd start looking around for a new gig.

toomuchtodo 10y ago
Because orgs don't want to pay extra for requiring you to be on call. Unless it's codified in labor law, they can extract that off hours work from you for free (in other professions, you're compensated just for being on call, and then further if a call comes in). As others in this thread have mentioned, people are wising up to the perils of being on call, along with the lack of compensation that goes with it. Source: 15 years of ops experience.
- dijit 10y ago
  there are companies that pay for being on-call and if additional sums if you get called. source: I work for Ubisoft and they pay me for being on-call and pay me per hour for when I get called.
  - toomuchtodo 10y ago
    I believe they exist (as you mention) but it's not as common as it should be (as it would if labor law required it).
  - scurvy 10y ago
    This probably comes from Ubisoft's French roots. It sounds like a very French attitude to take towards being called after hours (which is illegal there). I like that they do this for you; good on them!
- jsmthrowaway 10y ago
  > people are wising up to the perils of being on call I did too late. It started with being asked to sleep in the guest bedroom while on shift and only got worse from there. Take it from me: it takes active investment to keep a family healthy while on call, especially when you're on call at a shaky startup with several pages per day that require extensive remediation. I'm not stupid and I know on call was not the reason in itself, but it was a significant catalyst and debit upon my time and mental health -- not sleeping adds up. Be aware of it lest you end up like me, finally off call with an empty home to show for it.
  - hermitdev 10y ago
    Yeah, I worked at a hedge fund for nearly a decade. I got called back to the office from vacation after driving across the country for a development - not production - issue. I started getting 2-4 am calls for outages in dev by our offshore support who were too lazy and/or incompetent to read a log file and take action. Glad I don't work there anymore.
  - crpatino 10y ago
    It is not as bad if you can rely on a strong team (3.5 years there, no significant consequences in personal life). Some things that help: 1. Everybody is in the roll, not just the new guy(s). 2. The team is big enough for everyone to have a reasonable ratio of on-call vs off-call days. Merging two or more small teams into one single on-call roll of death does not count; people who is not knowledgeable on the problem at hand (e.g. everyone, eventually) will just fuck up and end up calling someone from the correct team anyways (after the problem has grown worse and the customer is angrier). 3. Team is encouraged to trade days or cover for each other if needed. 4. On-call guy has vetoe power over deployments. If you want to push something urgent at the end of the day, you better make yourself available to the guy that can vetoe your deployment. 5. Management understands that developer's productivity will slow down while on-call, and plan accordingly.
KallDrexx 10y ago
Every policy that gets put in place has the possibility of influencing behavior of those involved. If your organization pays extra for on-call work, that influences buggier code because you will get paid to fix or solve it later (even if it's not intentionally buggy). You see this all the time with contract work and it's a huge issue with low bids that end up costing a lot more because of the sunk cost. Edit In fact, you already have developers fighting this incentive at your organization. If developers are already writing buggy code hoping that it will be someone else's issue and not caring when it's their turn to be on call, imagine when they get paid extra to fix the bugs they introduced to begin with
- marblar 10y ago
  Why not pay a flat rate for taking the on-call responsibility, regardless of actual work performed?
  - sokoloff 10y ago
    This works. We did this for developer on-call rotations (which was also a development opportunity for rising engineers). We also did this when I ran Ops. It's not perfectly fair in the micro sense, but it's fair enough to not trip most people's frustration meter and it's very easy to administer.
    - joncrocks 10y ago
      The way it used to work in the organisation I used to be part of (generally a good bunch) was that there was a flat-rate, plus an extra payment if we were required to do something. Occasionally there was time in lieu given as well, if we were actually called and it was overnight/took a while. Worked well, but as a general rule we were delivering a quality product, had good guys working for us and so we all felt responsible if something went wrong out of hours and would look at what happened and how we would prevent it going forward.
      - sokoloff 10y ago
huherto 10y ago
IMHO. The problem with on-call rotation is that people just try to push the problems until it is someone else's turn. No one is looking at the root causes. No one is making changes on the systems to avoid problems in the future. No one is building operational support in the applications (mentioned by Johnny555 in another comment).
jwatte 10y ago
If you are an hourly employee, there is already extra pay for nights/weekend/long shifts. If you are salaried, you're expected to do the job that's needed, without particular daily time keeping. Easiest is to build robust infrastructure that recovers from failure, uses circuit breakers, soaks in forked workloads before being live, and such, so being on call is a low risk venture.

toomuchtodo 10y ago

Because orgs don't want to pay extra for requiring you to be on call. Unless it's codified in labor law, they can extract that off hours work from you for free (in other professions, you're compensated just for being on call, and then further if a call comes in). As others in this thread have mentioned, people are wising up to the perils of being on call, along with the lack of compensation that goes with it. Source: 15 years of ops experience.

dijit 10y ago
there are companies that pay for being on-call and if additional sums if you get called. source: I work for Ubisoft and they pay me for being on-call and pay me per hour for when I get called.
- toomuchtodo 10y ago
  I believe they exist (as you mention) but it's not as common as it should be (as it would if labor law required it).
- scurvy 10y ago
  This probably comes from Ubisoft's French roots. It sounds like a very French attitude to take towards being called after hours (which is illegal there). I like that they do this for you; good on them!
jsmthrowaway 10y ago
> people are wising up to the perils of being on call I did too late. It started with being asked to sleep in the guest bedroom while on shift and only got worse from there. Take it from me: it takes active investment to keep a family healthy while on call, especially when you're on call at a shaky startup with several pages per day that require extensive remediation. I'm not stupid and I know on call was not the reason in itself, but it was a significant catalyst and debit upon my time and mental health -- not sleeping adds up. Be aware of it lest you end up like me, finally off call with an empty home to show for it.
- hermitdev 10y ago
  Yeah, I worked at a hedge fund for nearly a decade. I got called back to the office from vacation after driving across the country for a development - not production - issue. I started getting 2-4 am calls for outages in dev by our offshore support who were too lazy and/or incompetent to read a log file and take action. Glad I don't work there anymore.
- crpatino 10y ago
  It is not as bad if you can rely on a strong team (3.5 years there, no significant consequences in personal life). Some things that help: 1. Everybody is in the roll, not just the new guy(s). 2. The team is big enough for everyone to have a reasonable ratio of on-call vs off-call days. Merging two or more small teams into one single on-call roll of death does not count; people who is not knowledgeable on the problem at hand (e.g. everyone, eventually) will just fuck up and end up calling someone from the correct team anyways (after the problem has grown worse and the customer is angrier). 3. Team is encouraged to trade days or cover for each other if needed. 4. On-call guy has vetoe power over deployments. If you want to push something urgent at the end of the day, you better make yourself available to the guy that can vetoe your deployment. 5. Management understands that developer's productivity will slow down while on-call, and plan accordingly.

KallDrexx 10y ago

Every policy that gets put in place has the possibility of influencing behavior of those involved. If your organization pays extra for on-call work, that influences buggier code because you will get paid to fix or solve it later (even if it's not intentionally buggy). You see this all the time with contract work and it's a huge issue with low bids that end up costing a lot more because of the sunk cost. Edit In fact, you already have developers fighting this incentive at your organization. If developers are already writing buggy code hoping that it will be someone else's issue and not caring when it's their turn to be on call, imagine when they get paid extra to fix the bugs they introduced to begin with

marblar 10y ago
Why not pay a flat rate for taking the on-call responsibility, regardless of actual work performed?
- sokoloff 10y ago
  This works. We did this for developer on-call rotations (which was also a development opportunity for rising engineers). We also did this when I ran Ops. It's not perfectly fair in the micro sense, but it's fair enough to not trip most people's frustration meter and it's very easy to administer.
  - joncrocks 10y ago
    The way it used to work in the organisation I used to be part of (generally a good bunch) was that there was a flat-rate, plus an extra payment if we were required to do something. Occasionally there was time in lieu given as well, if we were actually called and it was overnight/took a while. Worked well, but as a general rule we were delivering a quality product, had good guys working for us and so we all felt responsible if something went wrong out of hours and would look at what happened and how we would prevent it going forward.
    - sokoloff 10y ago

huherto 10y ago

IMHO. The problem with on-call rotation is that people just try to push the problems until it is someone else's turn. No one is looking at the root causes. No one is making changes on the systems to avoid problems in the future. No one is building operational support in the applications (mentioned by Johnny555 in another comment).

jwatte 10y ago

If you are an hourly employee, there is already extra pay for nights/weekend/long shifts. If you are salaried, you're expected to do the job that's needed, without particular daily time keeping. Easiest is to build robust infrastructure that recovers from failure, uses circuit breakers, soaks in forked workloads before being live, and such, so being on call is a low risk venture.