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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

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.

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.