6 ms·

On my last job somebody told my it's my turn for the support phone. In our case text messages if web based products are down. I never heard of it before, not du

On my last job somebody told my it's my turn for the support phone. In our case text messages if web based products are down. I never heard of it before, not during my interview or first month, never. I didn't know how to react and said sure, here's my number. After waking up twice during the night I decided to mute my phone completly from 10pm to 7am. Sometimes I woke up and had 50 messages and would try to solve the problem from home before heading in the office. Sometimes a coworker was already on it if they were in the office early. One time my boss asked in the morning if I didn't get any messages. I said sure I did, but I was sleeping, I don't get paid to get up in the middle of the night. He didn't say anything and I would keep turning my notifications off :)

ownagefool 8y ago
I largely believe developers should be responsible for their work, which includes meeting the support requirements out of hours, and understanding the tooling and instrumentation required to keep their work healthy. However, hiring people and not telling them this is part of the job is insanely unfair. People should get paid for being on-call. Further still, if something is going to wake me up during the night, I would expect to be able to work on those problems as a priority. If I can't do that, then no dice, and thus this further explains why I don't really agree that Devs should be able to throw code over the wall at Ops, and ruin their lives whilst they sleep easy and priortise features over stability.
- Hendrikto 8y ago
  > I largely believe developers should be responsible for their work Definitely > which includes meeting the support requirements out of hours Definitely not
  - Verdex_3 8y ago
    Division of labor is a thing. I'm good at transforming customer interactions into requirements and then transforming requirements into working code. I'm not good with dealing with issues with a deployed product while I should be busy living my life.
    - re-actor 8y ago
      So push the burden onto somebody else? Why aren't they allowed to "be busying living [their] life"?
      - Verdex_3 8y ago
        They should be free to live their life. If it turns out that the company doesn't actually have enough money to hire enough people to perform all of the duties that it needs to continue to exist, then that company should cease to exist. Which is desirable over the alternative of having rich company owners externalize their failure to run their company adequately by stealing the lives of employees who don't have the ability to say no to an unethical violation of their right to live their life.
        illiac_1962 8y ago
        Spot on. I ended up with a new boss at a new company through an acquisition. He gently asked about me getting on the on-call rotation. Which meant work 24/7 because the company didn't know how to manage technology. I enthusiastically agreed and gave him a big spiel about how this is expected, yada, I'm a team player, yada. I fucking parachuted immediately and gave one day notice.
        jasonlotito 8y ago
        > They should be free to live their life. How does an on-call rotation prevent this?
        MereInterest 8y ago
        Depends entirely on the on-call rotation. I've been on one where you could go the entire week without being paged, and where most of the pages did not require an immediate response. That did not prevent me from living my life. I've been on another where there were several pages every day, at all hours of the day, each of which could take anywhere from 30 minutes to several hours. That one certainly prevented me from living my life.
  - web007 8y ago
    Why not? Where does that responsibility end?
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - code_beers 8y ago
      Why not? Because I’m paid for 40 hours, and I work 40 hours. Why aren’t mechanics pulled in at 2am to perform warranty work, if they originally fixed the car? Same reason, that would be ridiculous. Where does the responsibility end? At me doing the best job possible under the circumstances, all that could be expected of a human being.
- patatino 8y ago
  > I largely believe developers should be responsible for their work, which includes meeting the support requirements out of hours Do you think the same about your previous jobs? If they find a bug you wrote you should come in and fix it?
  - ownagefool 8y ago
    Bit of a straw man, but I imagine products that need 24/7 support would have more than a single owner and would be doing some sort of code review, thus it's not about you being on-call for eternity, just that you should be involved in the process of supporting code so that you write code that is supportable.
- adetrest 8y ago
  Where it breaks down is when you add a developer are forced to write and deploy shitty code. You know it's broken, told the PO/PM/whoever is in charge, and they refused to listen. Or when new features are more important than fixing bugs.
  - Verdex_3 8y ago
    Hear hear. Give me actual autonomy and I'll happily be responsible for my code. Make me implement a crappy design and then deploy before it's functional and I'll happily send out resumes while other people work nights and weekends trying to fix garbage that was never going to work in the first place.
  - ownagefool 8y ago
    One tactic I've used in the past is requiring the PO to be on the calls, otherwise I won't be. However, ultimatly if you work for someone who doesn't care about your quality of live, you should probably move on.
ascar 8y ago
My contract with a company that had on call read somewhere along the lines of 9 to 5 are the core working times and all work necessary outside these times, including Saturday and Sunday, is already remunerated in the base salary. In this case I was being paid for it and I only heard about it in the first week after starting. I asked "how often do I have to work on weekends", but not "will i be on call" in the contract negotiations. Definitely a question I will ask in the future. Although I think being on call is a good thing.
- HeyLaughingBoy 8y ago
  Why do you think it's a good thing?
  - ascar 8y ago
    Because it increases responsibility, when you are the who has to clean up the mess. It makes you care more to keep your system reliable and available, because your personal stakes are higher. There are some good comments here along those same lines. Of course getting a call middle of the night, when your system goes down because of an AWS outage you can nothing do about just sucks ;)
- tristor 8y ago
  Disclaimer: IANAL " all work necessary outside these times, including Saturday and Sunday, is already remunerated in the base salary." That's actually not enforceable in most US states. Typically a base salary cannot cover work which is outside normal business hours if it's a consistent expectation that work will be performed outside normal business hours. Contracts are enforceable because both parties are given "due consideration", so that the terms are intended to be mutually beneficial. As written, what you described is basically saying "Do more work, do it outside typically expected times to perform work, and you're not getting anything more for doing this." As an example of how this works, in a situation in which you will work consistently outside normal business hours but are a salaried employee, such as a manager supervising an overnight crew at a manufacturing facility, you will be awarded "Shift Differential Pay", which is a percentage or dollar amount differential above and beyond normal pay for someone of your position at the company as "due consideration" for agreeing to work outside normal business hours. This would be true for your overnight crew on the line as well, except that it's included in their hourly. Being salaried does not automatically mean you are a slave to the company and their whims, and being overtime exempt does not mean you can be asked to consistently work outside normal business hours week after week without any additional compensation. Overtime is an occasional action, if you are being asked to work outside normal business hours as a standard operating practice, that's something else entirely.
krzrak 8y ago
> After waking up twice during the night I decided to mute my phone completly from 10pm to 7am. Have you considered mentioning this to your colleagues, boss or anyone telling you it's your turn? If not - it's really not cool towards your colleagues, boss and organization in general.
- apercu 8y ago
  I see where you are coming from, but unless it was something I specifically agreed to in my employment contract I wouldn't be "on call" during normal sleeping hours, either. (I was on call every 3rd week back in my biomed days but I was explicitly compensated above my normal pay for this)
  - HeyLaughingBoy 8y ago
    Me too, in the same field surprisingly enough! Although in our case, it was more like being on call for a week every 6-8 weeks.
- patatino 8y ago
  I told everyone, yes. I don't mind working extra hours to meet a goal, or come in on the weekend sometimes to finish something, I did that many times. But If you want me to wake up in the middle of the night you either be: a) my wife b) my kids c) willing to pay me
- toomuchtodo 8y ago
  It is unfortunate when emotional manipulation is attempted to support wage theft and employee abuse.
- drb91 8y ago
  It’s up to the employer to make expectations clear.
- Verdex_3 8y ago
  You are right. It isn't cool. But I assert that the not cool party is the employer who sprung an on call job requirement without any warning. Additionally, if this job duty was actually important, then the employer would actually react with some criticism when they discovered that an employee was not performing this duty adequately. The fact that the employer isn't upset about having the on call employee ignoring messages means that it isn't important. Making employees being on call when the employer doesn't actually care about anyone being on call is also not cool.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

ownagefool 8y ago

I largely believe developers should be responsible for their work, which includes meeting the support requirements out of hours, and understanding the tooling and instrumentation required to keep their work healthy. However, hiring people and not telling them this is part of the job is insanely unfair. People should get paid for being on-call. Further still, if something is going to wake me up during the night, I would expect to be able to work on those problems as a priority. If I can't do that, then no dice, and thus this further explains why I don't really agree that Devs should be able to throw code over the wall at Ops, and ruin their lives whilst they sleep easy and priortise features over stability.

Hendrikto 8y ago
> I largely believe developers should be responsible for their work Definitely > which includes meeting the support requirements out of hours Definitely not
- Verdex_3 8y ago
  Division of labor is a thing. I'm good at transforming customer interactions into requirements and then transforming requirements into working code. I'm not good with dealing with issues with a deployed product while I should be busy living my life.
  - re-actor 8y ago
    So push the burden onto somebody else? Why aren't they allowed to "be busying living [their] life"?
    - Verdex_3 8y ago
      They should be free to live their life. If it turns out that the company doesn't actually have enough money to hire enough people to perform all of the duties that it needs to continue to exist, then that company should cease to exist. Which is desirable over the alternative of having rich company owners externalize their failure to run their company adequately by stealing the lives of employees who don't have the ability to say no to an unethical violation of their right to live their life.
      - illiac_1962 8y ago
        Spot on. I ended up with a new boss at a new company through an acquisition. He gently asked about me getting on the on-call rotation. Which meant work 24/7 because the company didn't know how to manage technology. I enthusiastically agreed and gave him a big spiel about how this is expected, yada, I'm a team player, yada. I fucking parachuted immediately and gave one day notice.
      - jasonlotito 8y ago
        > They should be free to live their life. How does an on-call rotation prevent this?
        MereInterest 8y ago
        Depends entirely on the on-call rotation. I've been on one where you could go the entire week without being paged, and where most of the pages did not require an immediate response. That did not prevent me from living my life. I've been on another where there were several pages every day, at all hours of the day, each of which could take anywhere from 30 minutes to several hours. That one certainly prevented me from living my life.
- web007 8y ago
  Why not? Where does that responsibility end?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - code_beers 8y ago
    Why not? Because I’m paid for 40 hours, and I work 40 hours. Why aren’t mechanics pulled in at 2am to perform warranty work, if they originally fixed the car? Same reason, that would be ridiculous. Where does the responsibility end? At me doing the best job possible under the circumstances, all that could be expected of a human being.
patatino 8y ago
> I largely believe developers should be responsible for their work, which includes meeting the support requirements out of hours Do you think the same about your previous jobs? If they find a bug you wrote you should come in and fix it?
- ownagefool 8y ago
  Bit of a straw man, but I imagine products that need 24/7 support would have more than a single owner and would be doing some sort of code review, thus it's not about you being on-call for eternity, just that you should be involved in the process of supporting code so that you write code that is supportable.
adetrest 8y ago
Where it breaks down is when you add a developer are forced to write and deploy shitty code. You know it's broken, told the PO/PM/whoever is in charge, and they refused to listen. Or when new features are more important than fixing bugs.
- Verdex_3 8y ago
  Hear hear. Give me actual autonomy and I'll happily be responsible for my code. Make me implement a crappy design and then deploy before it's functional and I'll happily send out resumes while other people work nights and weekends trying to fix garbage that was never going to work in the first place.
- ownagefool 8y ago
  One tactic I've used in the past is requiring the PO to be on the calls, otherwise I won't be. However, ultimatly if you work for someone who doesn't care about your quality of live, you should probably move on.

ascar 8y ago

My contract with a company that had on call read somewhere along the lines of 9 to 5 are the core working times and all work necessary outside these times, including Saturday and Sunday, is already remunerated in the base salary. In this case I was being paid for it and I only heard about it in the first week after starting. I asked "how often do I have to work on weekends", but not "will i be on call" in the contract negotiations. Definitely a question I will ask in the future. Although I think being on call is a good thing.

HeyLaughingBoy 8y ago
Why do you think it's a good thing?
- ascar 8y ago
  Because it increases responsibility, when you are the who has to clean up the mess. It makes you care more to keep your system reliable and available, because your personal stakes are higher. There are some good comments here along those same lines. Of course getting a call middle of the night, when your system goes down because of an AWS outage you can nothing do about just sucks ;)
tristor 8y ago
Disclaimer: IANAL " all work necessary outside these times, including Saturday and Sunday, is already remunerated in the base salary." That's actually not enforceable in most US states. Typically a base salary cannot cover work which is outside normal business hours if it's a consistent expectation that work will be performed outside normal business hours. Contracts are enforceable because both parties are given "due consideration", so that the terms are intended to be mutually beneficial. As written, what you described is basically saying "Do more work, do it outside typically expected times to perform work, and you're not getting anything more for doing this." As an example of how this works, in a situation in which you will work consistently outside normal business hours but are a salaried employee, such as a manager supervising an overnight crew at a manufacturing facility, you will be awarded "Shift Differential Pay", which is a percentage or dollar amount differential above and beyond normal pay for someone of your position at the company as "due consideration" for agreeing to work outside normal business hours. This would be true for your overnight crew on the line as well, except that it's included in their hourly. Being salaried does not automatically mean you are a slave to the company and their whims, and being overtime exempt does not mean you can be asked to consistently work outside normal business hours week after week without any additional compensation. Overtime is an occasional action, if you are being asked to work outside normal business hours as a standard operating practice, that's something else entirely.

krzrak 8y ago

> After waking up twice during the night I decided to mute my phone completly from 10pm to 7am. Have you considered mentioning this to your colleagues, boss or anyone telling you it's your turn? If not - it's really not cool towards your colleagues, boss and organization in general.

apercu 8y ago
I see where you are coming from, but unless it was something I specifically agreed to in my employment contract I wouldn't be "on call" during normal sleeping hours, either. (I was on call every 3rd week back in my biomed days but I was explicitly compensated above my normal pay for this)
- HeyLaughingBoy 8y ago
  Me too, in the same field surprisingly enough! Although in our case, it was more like being on call for a week every 6-8 weeks.
patatino 8y ago
I told everyone, yes. I don't mind working extra hours to meet a goal, or come in on the weekend sometimes to finish something, I did that many times. But If you want me to wake up in the middle of the night you either be: a) my wife b) my kids c) willing to pay me
toomuchtodo 8y ago
It is unfortunate when emotional manipulation is attempted to support wage theft and employee abuse.
drb91 8y ago
It’s up to the employer to make expectations clear.
Verdex_3 8y ago
You are right. It isn't cool. But I assert that the not cool party is the employer who sprung an on call job requirement without any warning. Additionally, if this job duty was actually important, then the employer would actually react with some criticism when they discovered that an employee was not performing this duty adequately. The fact that the employer isn't upset about having the on call employee ignoring messages means that it isn't important. Making employees being on call when the employer doesn't actually care about anyone being on call is also not cool.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]