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> If an organization thinks their systems should be available 24x7 they should staff people 24x7. I’m a software engineer. I’m paid well partly because things

• deleted 5y ago
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• coldtea 5y ago
  >I’m a software engineer. I’m paid well partly because things like oncall are necessary. It’s priced into the compensation. Or you priced yourself down.
• tragictrash 5y ago
  Haha, That's why you still have to do on call.
• _l4lu 5y ago
  This attitude is very common with software engineers and I find it baffling. Is it some kind of inferiority complex? I doubt Warren Buffett worries that he is overpaid and demands to be woken up in the middle of the night for some self-flagellation. So why do so many software engineers think "I am paid well so I deserve whatever the company throws at me"? You are selling something: your skills, expertise, and time on this planet. These things are limited and valuable. Negotiate the price and terms of the sale!
  • option_greek 5y ago
    I would say its a superiority complex : thinking software engineers are paid well and hence need to be ready to sacrifice more to maintain this superior position. And of course also because the risks of bad or interrupted sleep is not recognised widely and mostly ignored.
    • drewcoo 5y ago
      Which is why you can also see the exec team paged in the middle of the night, right? Because they're paid well and need to sacrifice?
      • SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
        I’ve definitely seen my exec team get paged in the middle of the night, and they didn’t give any indication that it was unreasonable or uncommon. If anything they seemed to enjoy it, which to be honest I do as well. Being woken up to solve a problem (on rare occasion) can be validation that you’re an important person working on important things.
        • gladinovax 5y ago
          Clearly you don't think very highly of yourself. Sad.
          • dang 5y ago
            Can you please not create accounts to post flamewar comments to HN? It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
        • redisman 5y ago
          Gross
        • deleted 5y ago
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      • deleted 5y ago
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      • joshuamorton 5y ago
        Yes, and had their vacations cut short and other such things than rank and file employees would tolerate far less.
  • skybrian 5y ago
    While I agree that in general they shouldn’t feel bad about asking to be being Paid More (tm) you are making unwarranted assumptions about how happy they are with their current employment situation. You don’t know them, don’t know how much they’re paid, and don’t know how well or badly they deal with being on call. There is nothing immoral about deciding you’re happy.
    • coldtea 5y ago
      >There is nothing immoral about deciding you’re happy. It is when it sends a signal (about the job, market, etc) that also affects others.
      • dcow 5y ago
        Under what moral framework?
        • nzmsv 5y ago
          Not moral, practical. The majority of places that do on-call do it because it's the default. That's the problem with on-call: it somehow took on moral undertones. And as a result it does not feel safe to speak out against it. If on-call was widely seen as a negative (that a few people like because it gives them a sense of importance, more power to them) then there would be far fewer companies pushing for it as the default. As it stands, most people suffer silently for lack of an alternative. And the first step towards change is to make it OK to publicly say that on-call's a negative, a health hazard, and other options exist (though they may cost more).
      • shukantpal 5y ago
        No it is not. Because your signal is the truth for you.
        • coldtea 5y ago
          Truth is not morality. "Truth for you" much less so. All kinds of scumbags have their "personal truth" that justifies their actions too...
  • rocgf 5y ago
    I also find it baffling that people still think about things the way you do. It's not necessarily some kind of inferiority complex or anything else, it's about the free market.
    • coldtea 5y ago
      "Free" market just means people bound by monetary considerations...
      • rsj_hn 5y ago
        It means no one has to trade with you if they don't like what you have to offer in return. If you consider that "bound", then OK, but that language doesn't illuminate, it hides. It is a painful slap in the face when the market doesn't price what you have to offer as high a you like. I know a friend who was convinced that her calling was to be an artist, but always had a hard time selling her works, and often complained about the unfairness of life. I guess she was "bound" by monetary considerations by not being able to make ends meet as an artist. Eventually she gave up and became a hospital lab tech and is well compensated. So the market was telling her that her skills as a hospital lab tech were much more valuable to society than her skills as an artist, even if her own preferences were otherwise. At the same time, some other artist can buy an entire oceanside condo for one painting, because the market does value their output very highly. That's all that we're talking about here. It is "free" but that doesn't mean that you'll be able to get whatever you want in exchange for your own output.
        • nzmsv 5y ago
          The free market works the other way too though. If lab techs were in high demand (as they are), and your friend's employer was demanding an unreasonable schedule, she'd be free to jump ship to a better job. Right now software engineers have that kind of market power, so why not use it? If tomorrow the market decides we are overpaid, we'll either accept it or change jobs like your friend did. What I don't get is not using the power the free market gives you because?...
  • staticassertion 5y ago
    Lots of other fields have on calls or out of work expectations. That's part of the job, and you're compensated highly. It's not like on call is a shock or something, it's not "whatever they throw at me", it's just... part of the job. My sister is a dentist, she has to be on call sometimes, it's not a shocker or something you don't know when you're signing up for the job. You're implying that people aren't negotiating, but that's baseless. Software engineers are highly compensated because of these expectations, and we all negotiate accordingly.
    • wildrhythms 5y ago
      >we all negotiate accordingly This is quite a sweeping statement to make. My first engineering job salary was non-negotiable. I was told to either accept it, or they 'rapidly' move to another candidate.
      • staticassertion 5y ago
        I meant more collectively. But of course, yes, it's sweeping. It'll change regionally, or based on experience, or company culture, etc. But I don't think it's unfair to say, especially in the US, that software engineers are highly compensated.
    • rodgerd 5y ago
      > Lots of other fields have on calls or out of work expectations. Yes, and in many of them there are call-out fees and overtime. Programmers and sysadmins have convinced themselves that, as "professionals" they are not aligned with traditional working-class constructs like this.
      • staticassertion 5y ago
        > Yes, and in many of them there are call-out fees and overtime. Why is that any better than just getting paid overall more? Lots of companies also have internal policies like "if you get called in on a weekend take a long weekend next week" etc in my experience.
  • jonas21 5y ago
    The CEOs of every Fortune 500 company (and many smaller ones too) are on-call 24/7.
    • YZF 5y ago
      1. They get paid 10's of millions of $'s a year. 2. I doubt this is true. I've worked (and do work) for fortune 500 companies and have never ever heard of a CEO being paged for some sort of emergency. Presumably there can be some sort of crisis where they'll have to be involved within some reasonable time (extremely rare) but that's not exactly the same thing. That's why they have people working for them. That's not to say that some CEOs (especially for smaller companies) don't work very hard.
      • PeterisP 5y ago
        They definitely get involved when there's a meaningful impact on the company operations. Every business continuity plan involves top management; I've personally seen it in mid-size companies, and for the really big megacorps, just recently I was looking at a case study on the Maersk (#297 in fortune 500) management response to a cyberattack and it pretty much starts with the chairman being woken up at 4am local time. (e.g. source at https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/maersk-reinstalled-45-000-pcs-and-4-000-servers-to-recover-from-notpetya-attack/ https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/maersk-reinst... ) "presumably there can be some sort of crisis [...] but that's not exactly the same thing." - I'd say that it's exactly the same thing; on-call engineers are (or should be) just on an escalation path for crisis/emergency events; top managers are higher up in the escalation chain (if it's not a routine thing that others can easily resolve) but they're on escalation chain for every aspect of a large company. Of course, those events need to be rare - for example, as the original article states, up to 2-3 actual calls per year for a person being on-call; we should probably make a serious distinction between "on-call for emergencies" (which should be rare) and "routine out-of-hours support" (which might get triggered every week or even more frequently, obviously not an extraordinary event but a standard business process), which is something quite different and should have different solutions than emergency escalation.
• taormina 5y ago
  Feel free to drive down your own value. This is the exactly what people are talking about when they say that they are looking for young and naive employees to exploit who won’t know better. You’re paid the big bucks because you have a very in-demand skill. Being dumb enough to answer a call at 3am is entirely orthogonal.
  • abc_lisper 5y ago
    Please heed this. This is the lesson you don’t want to learn from experience
    • philosopher1234 5y ago
      Why not?
      • haswell 5y ago
        Speaking from experience, the ensuing burnout and lack of sleep leading to other health challenges isn’t worth the “life lesson”.
      • abc_lisper 5y ago
        Because, you undervalue your time, you open yourself for abuse. May be that project that is behind can be done by you after work, as you sometimes do work then anyways. I have seen some managers who are acutely sensitive to this and repeatedly use this to their advantage while charming the underlings. Next, being on call means it is difficult to plan that long vacation, or a unplanned night of shit faced drinking with your buddies, or unable to sit with your kid in the night when she is sick. A perspective of life as unpredictable events helps reinforce this idea. You are, with out compensation making life predictable for others while making it less predictable to you. Third, your mental and physical health. Sleep disorders because of restlessness, groggy mornings and the stress that comes with normal working hours will take a toll over long term.
      • taormina 5y ago
        Let's do the laziest back of the napkin math. Let's pretend you make $100k and work 2000 hours a year. You make $50/hr. Let's say you do 50 hours of week between trying to impress your boss and getting woken up to do call. Congratulations, you are now a $40/hr employee! Also, in my experience, the people who aren't getting woken up at 3am (aka. your boss) don't value the time and effort needed to stabilize these systems. So they want you working on the new shiny product feature that will get them promoted. Fixing the crappy data pipeline that shouldn't alert every other night isn't a priority when you aren't the one being woken up. Well, it should be a priority, but I also don't work at that previous job for this exact reason. I took a nice pay increase and have never had to be on-call. Don't settle. EDIT: Original 2000 hours comes from 40 hours a week * 50 weeks. Like I said, back of the napkin math here.
• koheripbal 5y ago
  I partially agree. It really depends on how often I'm called when on-call. There is a world of difference between being called twice per year, and twice per week. ...and it's fine for that to be priced in as long as those expectations are as clear as the salary when I take the job.
• JackFr 5y ago
  Being on call is separable from your role as a software developer and can be compensated separately. My wife’s (non-technical) organization has a requirement for a junior and a senior duty officer to be available 24/7/365. These shifts are compensated and available for people to sign up for. If shifts don’t get filled, they fall to senior managers in a rotation. You can be sure these managers somehow pay enough that they only very rarely need to take shifts themselves.
• deleted 5y ago
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• gh0std3v 5y ago
  > It sounds like you should find a company that agrees with this opinion. I don’t agree. I agree that on-call is necessary in certain professions (e.g, doctors). I also agree that if an employee is willing to do on-call and they are compensated accordingly, then the practice is still ethical. However, to call someone to do work outside work hours is unreasonable. On-call is considered work time, so I am expecting to be contacted during that time. However, if I'm not on-call, then it is not time for me to work, and I shouldn't be contacted by my company and feel pressured to answer the call.
  • oceanplexian 5y ago
    I think a lot of founders would compare their startup to having a baby. Imagine if someone said “I want to have a baby but absolutely no waking up at 2AM”, you would be laughed at. Likewise, lots of engineers in tech are compensated in equity so you have a stake in the business. in that case the lines on what constitutes personal time are less defined. I don’t see it as a bad thing if I’m on vacation and need to grab a laptop and help on an incident. I’ll take an extra day of vacation later or sleep in the next day. Life doesn’t have to be so inflexible.
    • pseudalopex 5y ago
      Parents wake up for their own babies. Very few engineers have a meaningful stake in the business. And on call hours aren't proportional to equity generally. Imagine if someone said they expected someone else to wake up for their baby in exchange for lottery tickets. They said on call is ethical if an employee is willing and compensated accordingly. Additional paid time off is compensation.
    • __blockcipher__ 5y ago
      > Imagine if someone said “I want to have a baby but absolutely no waking up at 2AM”, you would be laughed at. Okay, now imagine that I have a baby. I offer you a .0001% ownership in the baby, and you have to get (potentially, but often actually) woken up for 1 week out of every 6. Does that sound like an arrangement that a rational, healthy, self actualized person would agree to? Of course not. You're getting all of the downside and none of the upside. In fact in many cases the "leadership" team themselves aren't even on call!
• UncleMeat 5y ago
  But loads of software engineers don't have oncall. And these jobs don't pay less as a rule. If you aren't at least getting overtime pay, then you are being scammed.
• sys_64738 5y ago
  > I’m a software engineer. I’m paid well partly because things like oncall are necessary. It’s priced into the compensation. It might be priced into your compensation but that's the exception. If you are paid "market rate" and on call is "priced in" then you're underselling your services by a large margin.
• danny_codes 5y ago
  Are you very young? I feel like young people are more exploitable and don't understand what they're sacrificing by being available all the time. I was the same way at the beginning of my career. Fortunately I had a good team, but there were definitely times where my sleep and health suffered from being on-call because I didn't know how to say no.