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"There is no situation where it’s ok to contact someone to do work outside of their work hours." Here's one. I get paged for urgent fixes maybe three times per

"There is no situation where it’s ok to contact someone to do work outside of their work hours." Here's one. I get paged for urgent fixes maybe three times per year. To staff all three shifts with senior engineers to cover for that would be enough to make the company unprofitable and lose many jobs. I don't much like being woken in the middle of the night for such things, but it's clearly necessary and not abusive.

deleted 5y ago
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whycombinatore 5y ago
On call typically means you gotta be online and respond within 15 minutes if paged. That's abusive. If you want a person to do that, then pay them for that. As an example, on call in Amazon works the way I described, and yes it is abusive.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  One argument is that you are being paid for it; it’s just not broken out into two lines, but the dollars are there. If you’re making $200K/yr, maybe $150K of that is for your job and $50K is for being on-call. That seems like a more than fair price (or at least one that’s in the ballpark) for periodic on-call service.
  - kelnos 5y ago
    In my experience, often people paid more end up not having on-call duties. I know several people who have negotiated high salaries from the start of their employment along with a stipulation that they will never be on the on-call rotation. In my own situation, I removed myself from on-call duties during a leave of absence, and never went back on after I returned to work. Since then, I've still gotten the same raises I got before.
    - lumost 5y ago
      An unfortunate reality of on call is that companies care about projects delivered, not disasters averted. Unless your stepping in to right the ship when a company is on fire operationally, and can point to specific action/results you delivered to right the ship - getting pages 8x per week does nothing for your career.
  - redisman 5y ago
    If that was the case we could easily see it in the salaries of on-call versus not on-call positions. This is clearly not the case.
    - shados 5y ago
      That's mostly because our industry is a bit of a mess. We clearly have different people doing completely different roles that are in the same career ladder with the same title. Forget on call, some folks with the same titles and same salaries often do easier or harder jobs. That's a separate problem. Salaries in the industry have a lot of expectations baked in, like the expectations of being able to learn and train yourself without the company having to pay for it (aside the occasional paid book). Being on call is another. That some folks can get the same pay regardless of their responsibilities or how hard their job actually is is, indeed, a problem.
- sdfhsdrhsd 5y ago
  Unless you're working hourly or the on-call duties weren't disclosed during salary negotiations, you're already paid for it. I'll happily take a call after hours if it means I'm in a cushy job being paid 200k/year to solve puzzles. My partner manages a Safeway and makes well under half what I do for easily twice the work, and he's effectively on-call 24/7 for his store. Is either situation ideal? No, but I recognize that even with the injustice of having to ack an occasional alert at 2am, I'm in a crazy fucking comfy spot.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - Invictus0 5y ago
    The question is whether it's abusive or not, not whether you personally are willing to accept being abused for X amount of money.
    - emodendroket 5y ago
      I would think the question of whether it's "abusive" should at some level be determined by observing labor practices elsewhere. Even if you don't, I doubt anyone is going to shed any tears for something "objectively" abusive if their own work situation is much worse.
      - Invictus0 5y ago
        > I would think the question of whether it's "abusive" should at some level be determined by observing labor practices elsewhere Let's take this idea to it's logical extreme then. Surely you would agree that slavery is abusive. If we imagine a society where there are only slaves and slaveowners, your position would lead one to believe that slavery is not abusive, simply because it's the status quo. This practice is abusive because it subverts the agreement that one will exchange their labor for pay within a defined set of hours (8 hours per day) and replaces it with the expectation (not agreement) that one will be "available" 24/7, but not actually "working" unless a pager goes off. This is plainly abusive, because it destroys your ability to use your free time to do things like drink alcohol, smoke marijuana, go hiking, go sailing, go for a run, etc. because you are required to be online with 15 minutes notice.
- conradfr 5y ago
  In France you're necessarily compensated for being on call and then paid when you are paged.
  - lovecg 5y ago
    How do salaries in France compare to the US?
    - rvnx 5y ago
      3'000 to 4500 USD monthly for a SRE
    - irtigor 5y ago
      I don't know about France but in my country that's also factored in the law and hiring offers except for jobs that are on managerial level (them the law says you don't have clock in but you also pretty much don't get to clock out and you mostly get paid well for that), which doesn't apply for developers and that means you get paid less if there is no "on call". Basically your base pay is the same on company A and company B (assuming they are truly equal), but since company B requires "on call" that is extra work that gets compensated based on your hourly rate or double that if it is during night time, in the same way for the same job in the same company who ever works night shifts get paid twice as much as the daily shift (before taxes).
  - glandium 5y ago
    Furthermore, if you do get called, you shouldn't go back to work until 11 hours after you finished handling that call.
  - flippantdev 5y ago
    French salaries for senior developers are less than entry level developers in the US. I have bootcamp students with 6 months of software development experience making more than top developers in France, lol. The few extra Euros you get for being on call hardly seems worth it. There's a reason French workers are almost always rioting. Low pay and very few opportunities.
- syshum 5y ago
  >>On call typically means you gotta be online and respond within 15 minutes if paged. No place I have ever worked has this kind of oncall policy. Most I have seen have a response time of 1hr, note resolution, but response. Amazon is large enough they should have people staffed 24/7 just by staggering the timezone codes at the different offices. This is how Cisco TAC works, you call them you get what ever timezone code is "day time" at that time. So I would agree that 15min on call is abusive, luckily this is not my experience as "typical" in the industry, hell even fully staffed 24/7 call centers typically do not have a 15min response time
  - joshuamorton 5y ago
    Call centers and oncall are different. Oncall is "when Facebook suddenly stops working, who is responsible for figuring out why and fixing it". These systems often have SLAs (either internal or public) in minutes. Response (ack and log on) times for these can be 30 minutes for less relevant services, but some have 15, or even 1-5 minute response times for highly critical stuff.
    - msh 5y ago
      1-5 minutes response time is not "Oncall". It's being at work.
- the_jeremy 5y ago
  I interviewed at Brex, and they required getting online within 5 minutes of being paged. (I did not get the offer, but I would not have accepted the offer after learning that.) Where I currently work the response time is "ideally within 15 minutes", which is a lot more manageable, since plenty of places I like to go are within 15 minutes of my house. My job pays more than average because of on-call, it's 1 week out of 6, and there's probably an average of 1 call out of business hours per week (mode is 0).
  - splatzone 5y ago
    5 minutes is absurd. You'd basically have to keep your laptop with you at all times
- ActorNightly 5y ago
  They do pay people for that - the salaries at MAANG are inflated as is.
alistairSH 5y ago
The article explicitly states that’s reasonable. It’s the rotating pager duty that’s unreasonable.
dopylitty 5y ago
If they can’t afford to staff for 24x7 operation and maintain profitability that’s their problem. They should either reduce their service hours or charge more. By working for free you’re subsidizing your organization’s unsustainable business model.
- lightbendover 5y ago
  Getting paid 200k+ for a job that had on-call as part of stated duties (and thus baked into the comp) prior to accepting the offer is now working for free? There is hyperbole and then there is whatever this is. Don’t like it, quit and find a company that is moving slowly and doesn’t value ownership from engineers, someone else will fill in the vacant post. Sounds like a reasonably sustainable business model to me, especially since it has worked like this for over decades at some companies.
  - Invictus0 5y ago
    Amazing to see all these awful takes. This _is_ America I suppose.
  - YZF 5y ago
    There are plenty of jobs in good companies that pay well and don't require you to be a slave to your job. Companies that can move fast and treat their employees well vs. companies that exploit their employees. I am a manager in such a company and my team can move fast and own stuff during the work day and then relax on their weekend so they can get back to moving fast and owning stuff when they're back at work. This has totally not been this way for decades. Now if you're a founder, or you're being paid for this extra work or own a significant part of the business and benefit from it's success, that's a little bit different.
  - Retric 5y ago
    How many IT people on call are actually making 200+k? The general rule I have seen is people on call get paid less as people eventually negotiate very slightly lower salaries for not being on call.
xtracto 5y ago
I am quit amazed at the general reaction of this forum to this standard industry practice. If you want a cushy 9-5 job, go work for a code factory like HCL, TCS and whatnot. That way you can build crap and wash your hands after handling it to the customer. In a startup environment, you gotta build your shit and maintain it to. It's an environment that's not for everyone. I've been in oncall roosters several times in the past. And it made freaking sure we wrote the best software we could. I also have been on the management side of it, and the way I set it up is that whoever was the oncall engineer, if he had to work for more than 2 hours after normal working hours, he would get an additional PTO day. It actually worked quite well.
- coldtea 5y ago
  >If you want a cushy 9-5 job, go work for a code factory like HCL, TCS and whatnot. That way you can build crap and wash your hands after handling it to the customer. You got it backwards: if you want a crappy quality of life (or have no life and you only identify with the company that sees you as a replaceable cog), and crappy products and customer service from a company that doesn't care (to plan right, to hire accordingly, to treat its staff right) go on call and overwork, producing sleep-derived crap. Craftsmen and artisans take their time and have boundaries. "Feature factories", startups, and mass market crap companies forego 9-to-5 and indoctrinate naive employees that they do something important by doing so. >In a startup environment, you gotta build your shit and maintain it to. It's an environment that's not for everyone. Yes. It's for starry-eyed naive youngsters right off the bus. The kind of people to believe they're "changing the world" by building a Facebook or Groupon.
  - vasco 5y ago
    > Craftsmen and artisans take their time and have boundaries. I've been an engineer on-call for 7 years since graduating. In the meantime I handled a handful of business critical situations, developed my ability to keep cool during crisis and put my skills to the test. When I started doing it, I wasn't even paid for on-call. Now I am. The money has no bearing on me having been exploited or not. I've done it because it's cool, and when I think it's too tiring I won't do it anymore. Am I less of an engineer, not a true craftsman (wtv that means), because of this? There's other opinions in the world, no need to be so close minded.
UncleMeat 5y ago
The number of pages is only part of the story. Even if you never get paged a single time, oncall still sucks because you have some response requirement. If I could get paged and I need to respond within 30m then it is no hikes for me this weekend.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- javagram 5y ago
  FWIW, we have on-call at my work (all the developers are on PagerDuty schedule except the newest) and don’t have a written or agreed response requirement. It’s essentially best-effort, we had one instance where a page got ignored for hours by both primary and secondary responders and no one got in trouble. YMMV of course and I suspect we are laxer than most for various corporate and leadership reasons. I do bring my computer with me when traveling out of state when on call but generally don’t worry about e.g. going for a few hours hike or whatever even if I won’t have the laptop with me. If it were stricter it would definitely be more annoying…
  - UncleMeat 5y ago
    This one is even weirder to me. If it is best effort then this means that it is okay if the work doesn't get done. If that is the case, then why can't it be done the next morning? My team has an "oncall" shift like this where we assign a person to be responsible for triaging bugs and other non-urgent alerts just so we don't all stare at it and wait for somebody else (or inevitably me, the lead) to handle it but they are explicitly told that this responsibility does not extend beyond working hours.
LandR 5y ago
Yeah,my issue with being on call is that i can't ever really let loose if I'm expected to be contactable anytime 24/7...what if I'm out with friends, drunk, high, on the side of a mountain? Etc. My hours are 9-5, after that is entirely me time and if you expect me to br contact able and in s state of contribute you're going to be disappointed. No amount of money is worth losing that me time.
- je42 5y ago
  Usually, being "on call". should mean no alcoho, and have inet + computer closed by i.e. 5-15min or so. which also means that this should be time that is paid on some hourly rate for the lower quality of live during the on-call time. Also, there should be a rotation, with enough people to make this bearable.
  - wildrhythms 5y ago
    Are you describing the current state of on-call? Because that is what it is. There should be no rotation; there should be no on-call in the first place. If hiring staff to work normal hours is too expensive for the company, then the company has bigger problems than a service going down.
    - johntyree 5y ago
      I'm confused. What's your plan for fixing Gmail on a Saturday night? Hope one of the devs doesn't have a social life?
      - jodrellblank 5y ago
        Google is big enough to have teams around the world, all in their own daytime zone.
        aledalgrande 5y ago
        It's still the weekend wherever you are if it's Saturday in North America
YZF 5y ago
This sounds a bit hard to believe. Mind sharing some of the $ figures of this business? Nevertheless, I'm with the parent. This practice is abusive. When you're not working, you're not working. Being on call is working. If a company wants you to work longer hours they should make it explicit, pay for it, and comply with the local employment laws. This sort of argument that the business has no merit if they were to hire more people or pay can be applied to many exploitative situations. Most of the companies doing this are drowning in profits.
- p2t2p 5y ago
  My company pays for on-call. There is a rotation, you go for a week and they pay you more for that week by several hundred AUDs and it is basically a job requirement. Does the fact that it is discussed during hiring process and that it is paid change you opinion about being oncall?
  - YZF 5y ago
    I think that sounds fair. The concept of being on call is not unique to software engineers. You might be an emergency doctor. You might be a fighter pilot. It's possible that some software engineers need to be on call, because they support some critical infrastructure, and that can be part of their contract. I would say the default assumption for most software engineers should be they are not on call and the company should try to structure itself around that assumption. The problem starts it's just considered the norm that software engineers are expected to work 24/7.
bbarn 5y ago
I am of the mindset that a healthy team doesn't need an on call. Group chats, tight relationships, etc. usually mean someone is free just based on the odds to handle a true emergency. If you have so few people that the ship can't run, but you're not in a startup environment that justifies having so few people, that is your real problem. An average company with engineers who don't hate their job, staffed adequately, it should be a stars align kind of scenario where you can't get someone on a weekend. It's a simple matter of probability, and if that probability looks grim, either A. you're understaffed, or B, your staff is underengaged. I have fixed customer outages on my phone out having a good time more than once. Usually with another engineer happy to help. Not just at one company. If you need an on call rotation, your culture sucks. I'm not advocating that people live to work, I'm advocating that people work at places where people enjoy working with their peers and their product enough that an occasional blip isn't a big deal. With the right infrastructure and the right people you should have this.
- Arainach 5y ago
  > Group chats, tight relationships, etc. usually mean someone is free just based on the odds to handle a true emergency. Congratulations, you've made you entire team on call year round. I don't read work chats outside of core working hours if I'm not currently on-call. In general, most people shouldn't. Doing so is awful for your stress levels and work-life balance. I did it for more than a decade, burning out twice in the meantime, and things have been much better since I stopped.
  - psychstudio 5y ago
    I don't read group chats _inside_ working hours. I'm working at work, not group chatting.
    - thirdsun 5y ago
      If that means you're reading your chats later it sounds as if you're also working outside working hours.
  - 5y ago
duped 5y ago
This suggests a pricing issue for your uptime guarantees.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
crossroadsguy 5y ago
That’s your thought and unfortunately it lines with the parroting by exploitative managers. But if I’m on call and expected to reply to that call whenever the bell rings I’m working all these hours and days no matter how rarely or frequently that bell rings. On the other hand if it’s that less crucial for your company, 2-3 times a year without much monetary impact to warrant dedicated staff, I’m sure it can wait until necessary working morning just fine. It’s not whether I’m being utilised or not, it’s that I’m being required to project my availability!
spaetzleesser 5y ago
"Here's one. I get paged for urgent fixes maybe three times per year. To staff all three shifts with senior engineers to cover for that would be enough to make the company unprofitable and lose many jobs. I don't much like being woken in the middle of the night for such things, but it's clearly necessary and not abusive." Do you have to be always available or can you go somewhere without connection?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

whycombinatore 5y ago

On call typically means you gotta be online and respond within 15 minutes if paged. That's abusive. If you want a person to do that, then pay them for that. As an example, on call in Amazon works the way I described, and yes it is abusive.

sokoloff 5y ago
One argument is that you are being paid for it; it’s just not broken out into two lines, but the dollars are there. If you’re making $200K/yr, maybe $150K of that is for your job and $50K is for being on-call. That seems like a more than fair price (or at least one that’s in the ballpark) for periodic on-call service.
- kelnos 5y ago
  In my experience, often people paid more end up not having on-call duties. I know several people who have negotiated high salaries from the start of their employment along with a stipulation that they will never be on the on-call rotation. In my own situation, I removed myself from on-call duties during a leave of absence, and never went back on after I returned to work. Since then, I've still gotten the same raises I got before.
  - lumost 5y ago
    An unfortunate reality of on call is that companies care about projects delivered, not disasters averted. Unless your stepping in to right the ship when a company is on fire operationally, and can point to specific action/results you delivered to right the ship - getting pages 8x per week does nothing for your career.
- redisman 5y ago
  If that was the case we could easily see it in the salaries of on-call versus not on-call positions. This is clearly not the case.
  - shados 5y ago
    That's mostly because our industry is a bit of a mess. We clearly have different people doing completely different roles that are in the same career ladder with the same title. Forget on call, some folks with the same titles and same salaries often do easier or harder jobs. That's a separate problem. Salaries in the industry have a lot of expectations baked in, like the expectations of being able to learn and train yourself without the company having to pay for it (aside the occasional paid book). Being on call is another. That some folks can get the same pay regardless of their responsibilities or how hard their job actually is is, indeed, a problem.
sdfhsdrhsd 5y ago
Unless you're working hourly or the on-call duties weren't disclosed during salary negotiations, you're already paid for it. I'll happily take a call after hours if it means I'm in a cushy job being paid 200k/year to solve puzzles. My partner manages a Safeway and makes well under half what I do for easily twice the work, and he's effectively on-call 24/7 for his store. Is either situation ideal? No, but I recognize that even with the injustice of having to ack an occasional alert at 2am, I'm in a crazy fucking comfy spot.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Invictus0 5y ago
  The question is whether it's abusive or not, not whether you personally are willing to accept being abused for X amount of money.
  - emodendroket 5y ago
    I would think the question of whether it's "abusive" should at some level be determined by observing labor practices elsewhere. Even if you don't, I doubt anyone is going to shed any tears for something "objectively" abusive if their own work situation is much worse.
    - Invictus0 5y ago
      > I would think the question of whether it's "abusive" should at some level be determined by observing labor practices elsewhere Let's take this idea to it's logical extreme then. Surely you would agree that slavery is abusive. If we imagine a society where there are only slaves and slaveowners, your position would lead one to believe that slavery is not abusive, simply because it's the status quo. This practice is abusive because it subverts the agreement that one will exchange their labor for pay within a defined set of hours (8 hours per day) and replaces it with the expectation (not agreement) that one will be "available" 24/7, but not actually "working" unless a pager goes off. This is plainly abusive, because it destroys your ability to use your free time to do things like drink alcohol, smoke marijuana, go hiking, go sailing, go for a run, etc. because you are required to be online with 15 minutes notice.
conradfr 5y ago
In France you're necessarily compensated for being on call and then paid when you are paged.
- lovecg 5y ago
  How do salaries in France compare to the US?
  - rvnx 5y ago
    3'000 to 4500 USD monthly for a SRE
  - irtigor 5y ago
    I don't know about France but in my country that's also factored in the law and hiring offers except for jobs that are on managerial level (them the law says you don't have clock in but you also pretty much don't get to clock out and you mostly get paid well for that), which doesn't apply for developers and that means you get paid less if there is no "on call". Basically your base pay is the same on company A and company B (assuming they are truly equal), but since company B requires "on call" that is extra work that gets compensated based on your hourly rate or double that if it is during night time, in the same way for the same job in the same company who ever works night shifts get paid twice as much as the daily shift (before taxes).
- glandium 5y ago
  Furthermore, if you do get called, you shouldn't go back to work until 11 hours after you finished handling that call.
- flippantdev 5y ago
  French salaries for senior developers are less than entry level developers in the US. I have bootcamp students with 6 months of software development experience making more than top developers in France, lol. The few extra Euros you get for being on call hardly seems worth it. There's a reason French workers are almost always rioting. Low pay and very few opportunities.
syshum 5y ago
>>On call typically means you gotta be online and respond within 15 minutes if paged. No place I have ever worked has this kind of oncall policy. Most I have seen have a response time of 1hr, note resolution, but response. Amazon is large enough they should have people staffed 24/7 just by staggering the timezone codes at the different offices. This is how Cisco TAC works, you call them you get what ever timezone code is "day time" at that time. So I would agree that 15min on call is abusive, luckily this is not my experience as "typical" in the industry, hell even fully staffed 24/7 call centers typically do not have a 15min response time
- joshuamorton 5y ago
  Call centers and oncall are different. Oncall is "when Facebook suddenly stops working, who is responsible for figuring out why and fixing it". These systems often have SLAs (either internal or public) in minutes. Response (ack and log on) times for these can be 30 minutes for less relevant services, but some have 15, or even 1-5 minute response times for highly critical stuff.
  - msh 5y ago
    1-5 minutes response time is not "Oncall". It's being at work.
the_jeremy 5y ago
I interviewed at Brex, and they required getting online within 5 minutes of being paged. (I did not get the offer, but I would not have accepted the offer after learning that.) Where I currently work the response time is "ideally within 15 minutes", which is a lot more manageable, since plenty of places I like to go are within 15 minutes of my house. My job pays more than average because of on-call, it's 1 week out of 6, and there's probably an average of 1 call out of business hours per week (mode is 0).
- splatzone 5y ago
  5 minutes is absurd. You'd basically have to keep your laptop with you at all times
ActorNightly 5y ago
They do pay people for that - the salaries at MAANG are inflated as is.

alistairSH 5y ago

The article explicitly states that’s reasonable. It’s the rotating pager duty that’s unreasonable.

dopylitty 5y ago

If they can’t afford to staff for 24x7 operation and maintain profitability that’s their problem. They should either reduce their service hours or charge more. By working for free you’re subsidizing your organization’s unsustainable business model.

lightbendover 5y ago
Getting paid 200k+ for a job that had on-call as part of stated duties (and thus baked into the comp) prior to accepting the offer is now working for free? There is hyperbole and then there is whatever this is. Don’t like it, quit and find a company that is moving slowly and doesn’t value ownership from engineers, someone else will fill in the vacant post. Sounds like a reasonably sustainable business model to me, especially since it has worked like this for over decades at some companies.
- Invictus0 5y ago
  Amazing to see all these awful takes. This _is_ America I suppose.
- YZF 5y ago
  There are plenty of jobs in good companies that pay well and don't require you to be a slave to your job. Companies that can move fast and treat their employees well vs. companies that exploit their employees. I am a manager in such a company and my team can move fast and own stuff during the work day and then relax on their weekend so they can get back to moving fast and owning stuff when they're back at work. This has totally not been this way for decades. Now if you're a founder, or you're being paid for this extra work or own a significant part of the business and benefit from it's success, that's a little bit different.
- Retric 5y ago
  How many IT people on call are actually making 200+k? The general rule I have seen is people on call get paid less as people eventually negotiate very slightly lower salaries for not being on call.

xtracto 5y ago

I am quit amazed at the general reaction of this forum to this standard industry practice. If you want a cushy 9-5 job, go work for a code factory like HCL, TCS and whatnot. That way you can build crap and wash your hands after handling it to the customer. In a startup environment, you gotta build your shit and maintain it to. It's an environment that's not for everyone. I've been in oncall roosters several times in the past. And it made freaking sure we wrote the best software we could. I also have been on the management side of it, and the way I set it up is that whoever was the oncall engineer, if he had to work for more than 2 hours after normal working hours, he would get an additional PTO day. It actually worked quite well.

coldtea 5y ago
>If you want a cushy 9-5 job, go work for a code factory like HCL, TCS and whatnot. That way you can build crap and wash your hands after handling it to the customer. You got it backwards: if you want a crappy quality of life (or have no life and you only identify with the company that sees you as a replaceable cog), and crappy products and customer service from a company that doesn't care (to plan right, to hire accordingly, to treat its staff right) go on call and overwork, producing sleep-derived crap. Craftsmen and artisans take their time and have boundaries. "Feature factories", startups, and mass market crap companies forego 9-to-5 and indoctrinate naive employees that they do something important by doing so. >In a startup environment, you gotta build your shit and maintain it to. It's an environment that's not for everyone. Yes. It's for starry-eyed naive youngsters right off the bus. The kind of people to believe they're "changing the world" by building a Facebook or Groupon.
- vasco 5y ago
  > Craftsmen and artisans take their time and have boundaries. I've been an engineer on-call for 7 years since graduating. In the meantime I handled a handful of business critical situations, developed my ability to keep cool during crisis and put my skills to the test. When I started doing it, I wasn't even paid for on-call. Now I am. The money has no bearing on me having been exploited or not. I've done it because it's cool, and when I think it's too tiring I won't do it anymore. Am I less of an engineer, not a true craftsman (wtv that means), because of this? There's other opinions in the world, no need to be so close minded.

UncleMeat 5y ago

The number of pages is only part of the story. Even if you never get paged a single time, oncall still sucks because you have some response requirement. If I could get paged and I need to respond within 30m then it is no hikes for me this weekend.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
javagram 5y ago
FWIW, we have on-call at my work (all the developers are on PagerDuty schedule except the newest) and don’t have a written or agreed response requirement. It’s essentially best-effort, we had one instance where a page got ignored for hours by both primary and secondary responders and no one got in trouble. YMMV of course and I suspect we are laxer than most for various corporate and leadership reasons. I do bring my computer with me when traveling out of state when on call but generally don’t worry about e.g. going for a few hours hike or whatever even if I won’t have the laptop with me. If it were stricter it would definitely be more annoying…
- UncleMeat 5y ago
  This one is even weirder to me. If it is best effort then this means that it is okay if the work doesn't get done. If that is the case, then why can't it be done the next morning? My team has an "oncall" shift like this where we assign a person to be responsible for triaging bugs and other non-urgent alerts just so we don't all stare at it and wait for somebody else (or inevitably me, the lead) to handle it but they are explicitly told that this responsibility does not extend beyond working hours.

LandR 5y ago

Yeah,my issue with being on call is that i can't ever really let loose if I'm expected to be contactable anytime 24/7...what if I'm out with friends, drunk, high, on the side of a mountain? Etc. My hours are 9-5, after that is entirely me time and if you expect me to br contact able and in s state of contribute you're going to be disappointed. No amount of money is worth losing that me time.

je42 5y ago
Usually, being "on call". should mean no alcoho, and have inet + computer closed by i.e. 5-15min or so. which also means that this should be time that is paid on some hourly rate for the lower quality of live during the on-call time. Also, there should be a rotation, with enough people to make this bearable.
- wildrhythms 5y ago
  Are you describing the current state of on-call? Because that is what it is. There should be no rotation; there should be no on-call in the first place. If hiring staff to work normal hours is too expensive for the company, then the company has bigger problems than a service going down.
  - johntyree 5y ago
    I'm confused. What's your plan for fixing Gmail on a Saturday night? Hope one of the devs doesn't have a social life?
    - jodrellblank 5y ago
      Google is big enough to have teams around the world, all in their own daytime zone.
      - aledalgrande 5y ago
        It's still the weekend wherever you are if it's Saturday in North America

YZF 5y ago

This sounds a bit hard to believe. Mind sharing some of the $ figures of this business? Nevertheless, I'm with the parent. This practice is abusive. When you're not working, you're not working. Being on call is working. If a company wants you to work longer hours they should make it explicit, pay for it, and comply with the local employment laws. This sort of argument that the business has no merit if they were to hire more people or pay can be applied to many exploitative situations. Most of the companies doing this are drowning in profits.

p2t2p 5y ago
My company pays for on-call. There is a rotation, you go for a week and they pay you more for that week by several hundred AUDs and it is basically a job requirement. Does the fact that it is discussed during hiring process and that it is paid change you opinion about being oncall?
- YZF 5y ago
  I think that sounds fair. The concept of being on call is not unique to software engineers. You might be an emergency doctor. You might be a fighter pilot. It's possible that some software engineers need to be on call, because they support some critical infrastructure, and that can be part of their contract. I would say the default assumption for most software engineers should be they are not on call and the company should try to structure itself around that assumption. The problem starts it's just considered the norm that software engineers are expected to work 24/7.

bbarn 5y ago

I am of the mindset that a healthy team doesn't need an on call. Group chats, tight relationships, etc. usually mean someone is free just based on the odds to handle a true emergency. If you have so few people that the ship can't run, but you're not in a startup environment that justifies having so few people, that is your real problem. An average company with engineers who don't hate their job, staffed adequately, it should be a stars align kind of scenario where you can't get someone on a weekend. It's a simple matter of probability, and if that probability looks grim, either A. you're understaffed, or B, your staff is underengaged. I have fixed customer outages on my phone out having a good time more than once. Usually with another engineer happy to help. Not just at one company. If you need an on call rotation, your culture sucks. I'm not advocating that people live to work, I'm advocating that people work at places where people enjoy working with their peers and their product enough that an occasional blip isn't a big deal. With the right infrastructure and the right people you should have this.

Arainach 5y ago
> Group chats, tight relationships, etc. usually mean someone is free just based on the odds to handle a true emergency. Congratulations, you've made you entire team on call year round. I don't read work chats outside of core working hours if I'm not currently on-call. In general, most people shouldn't. Doing so is awful for your stress levels and work-life balance. I did it for more than a decade, burning out twice in the meantime, and things have been much better since I stopped.
- psychstudio 5y ago
  I don't read group chats _inside_ working hours. I'm working at work, not group chatting.
  - thirdsun 5y ago
    If that means you're reading your chats later it sounds as if you're also working outside working hours.
- 5y ago

duped 5y ago

This suggests a pricing issue for your uptime guarantees.

deleted 5y ago

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crossroadsguy 5y ago

That’s your thought and unfortunately it lines with the parroting by exploitative managers. But if I’m on call and expected to reply to that call whenever the bell rings I’m working all these hours and days no matter how rarely or frequently that bell rings. On the other hand if it’s that less crucial for your company, 2-3 times a year without much monetary impact to warrant dedicated staff, I’m sure it can wait until necessary working morning just fine. It’s not whether I’m being utilised or not, it’s that I’m being required to project my availability!

spaetzleesser 5y ago

"Here's one. I get paged for urgent fixes maybe three times per year. To staff all three shifts with senior engineers to cover for that would be enough to make the company unprofitable and lose many jobs. I don't much like being woken in the middle of the night for such things, but it's clearly necessary and not abusive." Do you have to be always available or can you go somewhere without connection?