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It's funny how often I got rejected after saying that I am not 24/7 available and that I believe that, if someone needs to have this kind of availability, it me

It's funny how often I got rejected after saying that I am not 24/7 available and that I believe that, if someone needs to have this kind of availability, it means that something in the company is not working and needs to be fixed. The words they used in the rejections were always something like: "we feel like you are not willing to put enough skin in the game" or "everyone else sees the opportunity here is is willing to work their asses off, why are you different?" It's specially funny to hear all this after the CEO has basically told me that they are planning for an exit in a couple of years, and being someone who has seems this first hand a few times., it usually means everyone works til the point of burn out and, in the end, the CEO gets handsomely while everyone else has a regular Wednesday.

swensel 5y ago
I don't like having to be on call 24/7 either and would prefer to work on a team that has 24/7 ops, so the devs don't have to do that. However, in the case of a startup where the devs also do ops, what is the option? I don't understand the part where you said that this means something in the company is not working and needs to be fixed if devs need to be on call. What happens if something goes wrong with an environment and an auto restart doesn't fix the issue? I am curious because I'd like to have a better answer for potential startup opportunities that won't spend money on a 24/7 ops team and ask this of their devs.
- rjzzleep 5y ago
  Hire for it? Don't coerce your employees into doing something you you don't want to pay for? What most people don't think of is that when you're on 24/7 duty your salary is less than half of what it should be. Halfway decent enterprises will reimburse you for off-hour duty usually at multiple times your normal rate plus a minimum pay. Or just hire someone in a different timezone. The reality is though, most people don't need panic calls from their CEO at midnight and the company would still do perfectly fine without it. There really is no excuse for this.
  - varjag 5y ago
    Isn't that what the company in question was trying to do, hiring the devs who are willing to do 24/7 too?
    - danShumway 5y ago
      Sure, but then the lesson to take away from this is that the company in question apparently isn't offering enough to make that job worthwhile, and that's not the fault of the people turning them down. When the company phrases their rejection as "we don't think you're committed enough to do this", that's when things smell off to me. They're hiring for a specific role, they should act like it. As an analogy, if you hire me to build software, and then slip in that you expect me to spend 10 extra hours a week doing cold sales calls, I might turn down your job because I don't want to do sales, I'm an engineer. And the problem at that point isn't my commitment to the company, the problem is that the company hasn't figured out it needs to make the sales tasks part of the job description. How do interviews get to this point? How does a company get to the point where you're talking to the CEO, they're laying out their exit strategies, and the job requirements still haven't been made clear? > "we feel like you are not willing to put enough skin in the game" or "everyone else sees the opportunity here is is willing to work their asses off, why are you different?" Those quotes say to me that the owners are viewing this as a question of "loyalty" or moral obligation, not as a normal part of a job negotiation. A good test: if the CEO feels offended that you ask for more compensation in exchange for being online 24x7, then this isn't about trying to hire a specific role, it's about their ego/entitlement.
      - varjag 5y ago
        You could be right and it could well be the case, but we don't know really. We are only aware that the GP turned them down, but it's quite possible they had the position filled. One person wearing many hats is rather typical in small companies and early stage startups. Being asked to do extra is not something insulting per se, as long as you compensated accordingly, either with more hard money or (a lot more) equity. It is a non-starter proposition to many, which should be respected. But it's not something borderline criminal. > How does a company get to the point where you're talking to the CEO, they're laying out their exit strategies, and the job requirements still haven't been made clear? Look, if we're still talking about a startup it could well be the interviewer is the CEO, the guy who brought you coffee is CFO and you're interviewing for CTO/dev/ops/support in one :)
- toast0 5y ago
  I think you're basically right. At the end of the day, if the servers catch fire, you probably need to call the responsible developers for help getting things back on track. The real questions then are how is the work divided, what does escalation look like, what steps are taken to reduce incidents outside of office hours, what's being done to allow for urgent maintenance to wait until office hours, etc, and also like how well is that all working, and where is the leadership in this? I worked somewhere with not great answers to a lot of these questions, but it was okish because the cofounders were waking up with all the pages and hoping on to fix things too, and I had a mediocre experience with a dedicated ops team at a previous job that I didn't want to repeat. Eventually, as the team got bigger, we made a lot of things better, including on call responsibilities.
- deleted 5y ago
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- vidarh 5y ago
  The option is to compensate for it on top of extra salary to the point where you get enough volunteers for rotation, and/or hire for it. I had a side gig that very explicitly was being hired to be the guy that gets woken up by PagerDuty. They paid me about an extra $1k/month purely for having my phone on in addition to what they paid me for the time I spent dealing with actual issues. Even then $1k/month was only enough because most of the other work I did for them was explicitly to improve site availability so I could ensure the platform was resilient enough that I rarely got woken up. In effect my hourly rate for being woken up probably translated to $2k-$3k/hour, with it sometimes going half a year between being woken up, before suddenly a bad release might cost me sleep a few nights in a row. But having felt the stress of this on a full-time basis in the past, without that kind of compensation, I don't think it's cost-effective to have your dev team serve this role vs. having a few people on retainer to at least triage and try the obvious things. You're going to pay for it with staff that do not get proper rest (even when the phone doesn't go off it'll be there at the back of your head).
- michaelt 5y ago
  Where I work, being on call means being able to respond to a call by being at your laptop, with a reliable internet connection within 10 minutes - and able to keep working for as long as may be needed. That means no stopping at the gym on the way home, no going into the city to see a show, no lengthy car journeys, no getting drunk, no going on dates, no evening classes, no school plays, no sport that takes you more than a block away from home, no taking your kids to the park to feed the ducks. The idea you could have people be on call constantly sounds crazy to me.
gorbachev 5y ago
Funny how those same companies never are willing to pay you for that 24/7 availability. I'd be happy to do that, if they paid me for it, and not with bullshit options.
hinkley 5y ago
They say “skin in the game” but they mean “skin in the machine”. These sorts of word games work on young naive people, especially young men. Maybe we need to broadly educate people that this sort of exploitation is not okay...
- ad404b8a372f2b9 5y ago
  The valley is a machine, caked with blood, running on flesh.
  - astrange 5y ago
    The valley is mostly mature companies that don’t do this.
atoav 5y ago
> if someone needs to have this kind of availability, it means that something in the company is not working and needs to be fixed. The crazy thing is, they think they can just throw manhours at bad planning and somehow make it work. You can literally plan well, have a good life and still come out ahead of these chaotic organizations that make everybody run in circles out of pure panic. I have seen this so often in film projects: people believe by exploiting themselves, their crew and their cast they somehow "extract" more value and magically make it work. And that one one the point, relexad, but well-planned project will always achieve better results. Because oh wonder: crews and casts that are not overworked and that use their maximum potential where it matters instead of spreading it out over the whole project will always produce better results.
- planet-and-halo 5y ago
  I read a book by a consultant who said he could immediately gauge how well a factory was operating by looking at how relaxed the average workers were. The most efficient factories almost looked like nothing was happening, because they had a smooth and efficient process and knew how to calmly handle emergencies.
  - jimmont 5y ago
    if you can share the title/author of the book please do, I've seen this pattern in work as well
    - planet-and-halo 5y ago
      I can't be sure, but I think it was "Slack" by Demarco.
  - atoav 5y ago
    And what is true for the factory is also true for a film set. The thing many dont realize is: If you have a good plan and follow it, you will very often have more freedom to try out new things than when your planning is chaotic or non-existent — because then literally every step is made out of fear, out of panic, to avoid pain or because other decisions froced you into something. I say this because startups would argue about creativity and all that, but having worked aomw time both in art school and on film sets I can guarantee that the qell prepared always have more freedom than those who just try to figure things out as they go. Thinking it is somehow more honorable to plan badly, throw peoples lifetime at the thing and getting a somewhat okayish result is really problematic in my eyes. Romantizing things that could have been solved by realistic (or even pessimistic) planning is not cool, it just shows me that you have no experience.
driverdan 5y ago
There's a difference between being on call 24/7 and actually being called frequently. I consider myself on call 24/7 and tell my team this but in 3 years have never been woken up, nor have I had to wake someone else up. One day it will happen but once in 3+ years is perfectly reasonable.

swensel 5y ago

I don't like having to be on call 24/7 either and would prefer to work on a team that has 24/7 ops, so the devs don't have to do that. However, in the case of a startup where the devs also do ops, what is the option? I don't understand the part where you said that this means something in the company is not working and needs to be fixed if devs need to be on call. What happens if something goes wrong with an environment and an auto restart doesn't fix the issue? I am curious because I'd like to have a better answer for potential startup opportunities that won't spend money on a 24/7 ops team and ask this of their devs.

rjzzleep 5y ago
Hire for it? Don't coerce your employees into doing something you you don't want to pay for? What most people don't think of is that when you're on 24/7 duty your salary is less than half of what it should be. Halfway decent enterprises will reimburse you for off-hour duty usually at multiple times your normal rate plus a minimum pay. Or just hire someone in a different timezone. The reality is though, most people don't need panic calls from their CEO at midnight and the company would still do perfectly fine without it. There really is no excuse for this.
- varjag 5y ago
  Isn't that what the company in question was trying to do, hiring the devs who are willing to do 24/7 too?
  - danShumway 5y ago
    Sure, but then the lesson to take away from this is that the company in question apparently isn't offering enough to make that job worthwhile, and that's not the fault of the people turning them down. When the company phrases their rejection as "we don't think you're committed enough to do this", that's when things smell off to me. They're hiring for a specific role, they should act like it. As an analogy, if you hire me to build software, and then slip in that you expect me to spend 10 extra hours a week doing cold sales calls, I might turn down your job because I don't want to do sales, I'm an engineer. And the problem at that point isn't my commitment to the company, the problem is that the company hasn't figured out it needs to make the sales tasks part of the job description. How do interviews get to this point? How does a company get to the point where you're talking to the CEO, they're laying out their exit strategies, and the job requirements still haven't been made clear? > "we feel like you are not willing to put enough skin in the game" or "everyone else sees the opportunity here is is willing to work their asses off, why are you different?" Those quotes say to me that the owners are viewing this as a question of "loyalty" or moral obligation, not as a normal part of a job negotiation. A good test: if the CEO feels offended that you ask for more compensation in exchange for being online 24x7, then this isn't about trying to hire a specific role, it's about their ego/entitlement.
    - varjag 5y ago
      You could be right and it could well be the case, but we don't know really. We are only aware that the GP turned them down, but it's quite possible they had the position filled. One person wearing many hats is rather typical in small companies and early stage startups. Being asked to do extra is not something insulting per se, as long as you compensated accordingly, either with more hard money or (a lot more) equity. It is a non-starter proposition to many, which should be respected. But it's not something borderline criminal. > How does a company get to the point where you're talking to the CEO, they're laying out their exit strategies, and the job requirements still haven't been made clear? Look, if we're still talking about a startup it could well be the interviewer is the CEO, the guy who brought you coffee is CFO and you're interviewing for CTO/dev/ops/support in one :)
toast0 5y ago
I think you're basically right. At the end of the day, if the servers catch fire, you probably need to call the responsible developers for help getting things back on track. The real questions then are how is the work divided, what does escalation look like, what steps are taken to reduce incidents outside of office hours, what's being done to allow for urgent maintenance to wait until office hours, etc, and also like how well is that all working, and where is the leadership in this? I worked somewhere with not great answers to a lot of these questions, but it was okish because the cofounders were waking up with all the pages and hoping on to fix things too, and I had a mediocre experience with a dedicated ops team at a previous job that I didn't want to repeat. Eventually, as the team got bigger, we made a lot of things better, including on call responsibilities.
deleted 5y ago
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deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
vidarh 5y ago
The option is to compensate for it on top of extra salary to the point where you get enough volunteers for rotation, and/or hire for it. I had a side gig that very explicitly was being hired to be the guy that gets woken up by PagerDuty. They paid me about an extra $1k/month purely for having my phone on in addition to what they paid me for the time I spent dealing with actual issues. Even then $1k/month was only enough because most of the other work I did for them was explicitly to improve site availability so I could ensure the platform was resilient enough that I rarely got woken up. In effect my hourly rate for being woken up probably translated to $2k-$3k/hour, with it sometimes going half a year between being woken up, before suddenly a bad release might cost me sleep a few nights in a row. But having felt the stress of this on a full-time basis in the past, without that kind of compensation, I don't think it's cost-effective to have your dev team serve this role vs. having a few people on retainer to at least triage and try the obvious things. You're going to pay for it with staff that do not get proper rest (even when the phone doesn't go off it'll be there at the back of your head).
michaelt 5y ago
Where I work, being on call means being able to respond to a call by being at your laptop, with a reliable internet connection within 10 minutes - and able to keep working for as long as may be needed. That means no stopping at the gym on the way home, no going into the city to see a show, no lengthy car journeys, no getting drunk, no going on dates, no evening classes, no school plays, no sport that takes you more than a block away from home, no taking your kids to the park to feed the ducks. The idea you could have people be on call constantly sounds crazy to me.

gorbachev 5y ago

Funny how those same companies never are willing to pay you for that 24/7 availability. I'd be happy to do that, if they paid me for it, and not with bullshit options.

hinkley 5y ago

They say “skin in the game” but they mean “skin in the machine”. These sorts of word games work on young naive people, especially young men. Maybe we need to broadly educate people that this sort of exploitation is not okay...

ad404b8a372f2b9 5y ago
The valley is a machine, caked with blood, running on flesh.
- astrange 5y ago
  The valley is mostly mature companies that don’t do this.

atoav 5y ago

> if someone needs to have this kind of availability, it means that something in the company is not working and needs to be fixed. The crazy thing is, they think they can just throw manhours at bad planning and somehow make it work. You can literally plan well, have a good life and still come out ahead of these chaotic organizations that make everybody run in circles out of pure panic. I have seen this so often in film projects: people believe by exploiting themselves, their crew and their cast they somehow "extract" more value and magically make it work. And that one one the point, relexad, but well-planned project will always achieve better results. Because oh wonder: crews and casts that are not overworked and that use their maximum potential where it matters instead of spreading it out over the whole project will always produce better results.

planet-and-halo 5y ago
I read a book by a consultant who said he could immediately gauge how well a factory was operating by looking at how relaxed the average workers were. The most efficient factories almost looked like nothing was happening, because they had a smooth and efficient process and knew how to calmly handle emergencies.
- jimmont 5y ago
  if you can share the title/author of the book please do, I've seen this pattern in work as well
  - planet-and-halo 5y ago
    I can't be sure, but I think it was "Slack" by Demarco.
- atoav 5y ago
  And what is true for the factory is also true for a film set. The thing many dont realize is: If you have a good plan and follow it, you will very often have more freedom to try out new things than when your planning is chaotic or non-existent — because then literally every step is made out of fear, out of panic, to avoid pain or because other decisions froced you into something. I say this because startups would argue about creativity and all that, but having worked aomw time both in art school and on film sets I can guarantee that the qell prepared always have more freedom than those who just try to figure things out as they go. Thinking it is somehow more honorable to plan badly, throw peoples lifetime at the thing and getting a somewhat okayish result is really problematic in my eyes. Romantizing things that could have been solved by realistic (or even pessimistic) planning is not cool, it just shows me that you have no experience.

driverdan 5y ago

There's a difference between being on call 24/7 and actually being called frequently. I consider myself on call 24/7 and tell my team this but in 3 years have never been woken up, nor have I had to wake someone else up. One day it will happen but once in 3+ years is perfectly reasonable.