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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, TC

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.
  - yawaramin 5y ago
    When you were doing on-call without being paid, that's called wage theft. It's the single biggest kind of theft in North America: https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-bigger-problem-forms-theft-workers/ https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-bigger-problem-fo... It's also the kind of theft that insidiously convinces you that it's really cool and that you're actually OK with it because you're learning how to 'keep cool during crisis'. You know how else your employers could have taught you that? By providing actual training during working hours, while you were being paid.
    - SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
      I mean this with all the respect in the world, but I think you've gotten yourself caught in an ideological bubble here. To someone who doesn't already agree with you, this comment sounds like an argument against the concept of wage theft more than an argument against oncall. After all, you can't prove something's bad just by classifying it under a nasty-sounding label!
      - yawaramin 5y ago
        I purposefully did not make an argument against on-call, although I might have easily done that and others have in this thread. All I said is that doing on-call without pay is wage theft. And this is not an ideological bubble thing, as anyone will quickly understand if they ask a plumber to do on-call for their house plumbing system without pay.
        1123581321 5y ago
        A better analogy would be a plumber you pay a handsome annual salary to maintain and improve your pipes--to what degree should they owe some emergency time in return is the question in this thread.
        lotsofpulp 5y ago
        Plumbers (or companies employing plumbers) warranty their work. Do employees warranty their work for employers? I have never heard of that arrangement in the US.
- a-dub 5y ago
  i'd never heard of a "feature factory" before, but after reading about them, holy hell, that explains a ton of friction i had in a recent engagement. they had a laser focus on just shipping and success theater, but little attention on actual utility of the end product. i was berated constantly for slowing things down or wanting to be more careful and do things that weren't necessarily easy but actually had potential to be useful. it's relieving to learn this is a common management deficiency.
- bogantech 5y ago
  > Craftsmen and artisans take their time and have boundaries. Yeah but most of the people complaining only think they are Craftsmen but their day job is to write bad software to push ads
yawaramin 5y ago
You do understand that most startups fail, right? Clearly, on aggregate, their practices are not really working or worthy of imitation. For the ones that succeed, there's a huge element of luck. Otherwise people would make guarantees about success.
np- 5y ago
I think most experienced engineers realize on-call is a complete fool's game -- you will never get accolades for fixing shit at 2am. Literally never. Your only "reward" will be to become the escalation point to continue getting called at 2am. It's not only mentally demanding work, but also bottom-feeding work that gets no recognition. No one is doing their best work after being woken up in the middle of the night, it's all band-aid hacky fix shit that is being generated. Also in general the type of personality who would tolerate working 2+ hours beyond their working time is probably the type of person that isn't even going to use up all of their PTO to begin with, so I always find those kinds of rewards laughable.
- 1123581321 5y ago
  I don't find your experience to be the general case, though that doesn't invalidate your point. Accolades are an easy intangible reward to hand out so you will often see it given for heroics. Extra cash would be better. PTO is somewhere in the middle. On teams that can rotate through on-call, bonus PTO is more likely to be used than on ones where one or two engineers shoulder the responsibility all year.
- emodendroket 5y ago
  Well, putting the pipe dreams people have about a global team so nobody is ever working outside regular working hours aside (hope you've considered holidays, guys), what's the alternative? One I've seen is that there's an ops, or "devops," team, that's responsible for picking up the slack instead. But if it's unfair for engineers to have to do it, it seems even less fair for someone who doesn't even have control over what code ships to do it, and to do it without a rotation.
  - jodrellblank 5y ago
    > what's the alternative? Let it crash. If you can't afford to pay people enough that someone /wants/ to fix it at 2am, and you can't arrange a retainer for a contractor halfway around the world to be available if needed during their worktime, and you (owner/manager) don't want to do it yourself, then it can be off until someone starts at 9am next business day. (Most products and services aren't life critical).

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.
- yawaramin 5y ago
  When you were doing on-call without being paid, that's called wage theft. It's the single biggest kind of theft in North America: https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-bigger-problem-forms-theft-workers/ https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-bigger-problem-fo... It's also the kind of theft that insidiously convinces you that it's really cool and that you're actually OK with it because you're learning how to 'keep cool during crisis'. You know how else your employers could have taught you that? By providing actual training during working hours, while you were being paid.
  - SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
    I mean this with all the respect in the world, but I think you've gotten yourself caught in an ideological bubble here. To someone who doesn't already agree with you, this comment sounds like an argument against the concept of wage theft more than an argument against oncall. After all, you can't prove something's bad just by classifying it under a nasty-sounding label!
    - yawaramin 5y ago
      I purposefully did not make an argument against on-call, although I might have easily done that and others have in this thread. All I said is that doing on-call without pay is wage theft. And this is not an ideological bubble thing, as anyone will quickly understand if they ask a plumber to do on-call for their house plumbing system without pay.
      - 1123581321 5y ago
        A better analogy would be a plumber you pay a handsome annual salary to maintain and improve your pipes--to what degree should they owe some emergency time in return is the question in this thread.
        lotsofpulp 5y ago
        Plumbers (or companies employing plumbers) warranty their work. Do employees warranty their work for employers? I have never heard of that arrangement in the US.
a-dub 5y ago
i'd never heard of a "feature factory" before, but after reading about them, holy hell, that explains a ton of friction i had in a recent engagement. they had a laser focus on just shipping and success theater, but little attention on actual utility of the end product. i was berated constantly for slowing things down or wanting to be more careful and do things that weren't necessarily easy but actually had potential to be useful. it's relieving to learn this is a common management deficiency.
bogantech 5y ago
> Craftsmen and artisans take their time and have boundaries. Yeah but most of the people complaining only think they are Craftsmen but their day job is to write bad software to push ads

yawaramin 5y ago

You do understand that most startups fail, right? Clearly, on aggregate, their practices are not really working or worthy of imitation. For the ones that succeed, there's a huge element of luck. Otherwise people would make guarantees about success.

np- 5y ago

I think most experienced engineers realize on-call is a complete fool's game -- you will never get accolades for fixing shit at 2am. Literally never. Your only "reward" will be to become the escalation point to continue getting called at 2am. It's not only mentally demanding work, but also bottom-feeding work that gets no recognition. No one is doing their best work after being woken up in the middle of the night, it's all band-aid hacky fix shit that is being generated. Also in general the type of personality who would tolerate working 2+ hours beyond their working time is probably the type of person that isn't even going to use up all of their PTO to begin with, so I always find those kinds of rewards laughable.

1123581321 5y ago
I don't find your experience to be the general case, though that doesn't invalidate your point. Accolades are an easy intangible reward to hand out so you will often see it given for heroics. Extra cash would be better. PTO is somewhere in the middle. On teams that can rotate through on-call, bonus PTO is more likely to be used than on ones where one or two engineers shoulder the responsibility all year.
emodendroket 5y ago
Well, putting the pipe dreams people have about a global team so nobody is ever working outside regular working hours aside (hope you've considered holidays, guys), what's the alternative? One I've seen is that there's an ops, or "devops," team, that's responsible for picking up the slack instead. But if it's unfair for engineers to have to do it, it seems even less fair for someone who doesn't even have control over what code ships to do it, and to do it without a rotation.
- jodrellblank 5y ago
  > what's the alternative? Let it crash. If you can't afford to pay people enough that someone /wants/ to fix it at 2am, and you can't arrange a retainer for a contractor halfway around the world to be available if needed during their worktime, and you (owner/manager) don't want to do it yourself, then it can be off until someone starts at 9am next business day. (Most products and services aren't life critical).