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My team has what we call "the strike team" which is not just on-call but even during the day, your job is basically to make everything more robust (as opposed t

My team has what we call "the strike team" which is not just on-call but even during the day, your job is basically to make everything more robust (as opposed to what we do normally, which is work on new systems and features). So just last week or so there was an alert on Sunday that I then spent the week to fix permanently. These are also services that my team are the sole developers on so I know when I fix something it will generally stay fixed. On top of this, we have a rotation so each of us is only on-call one week out of maybe every four or five. And although I agreed to it mostly because it was a condition of the job and I wanted the job more for learning how the team worked than I cared about the money, the compensation for being on-call is actually pretty good even if nothing happens. And if on-call lands on a holiday, we get the holiday time as vacation days to spend later. So overall, while I would prefer not to be on-call, I feel like our team implements it about as well as can reasonably be expected. I expected it to drive me crazy, but it actually hasn't yet.

gc22browsing 4y ago
I used to work for a small systems integrator. We used on-call mobile phones, the "hot potato" was carried by the on-call engineer. Any actual time worked outside of core-working hours was paid back in the form of time-off-in-lieu. The salary generously reflected the being on-call requirement. The other factor was that a "call-out" was not completed until the root cause was fixed. I believe the real reason for the compassionate arrangements was that the owners of the business were former engineers and were even available to escalate calls to them if you got stuck. Our personal phones had everybody else's personal numbers in the address book, but we were never permitted to give them out to clients. Clients only had access to the "hot potato" phone numbers, which also received the various paged alerts, etc.
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 4y ago
  I don't think time off is enough,unless with a multiplier. 1 hour of on call task at 4am will affect the entire day, possibly the next one
  - muttled 4y ago
    And your health. Getting woken up often is not good for your heart!

gc22browsing 4y ago

I used to work for a small systems integrator. We used on-call mobile phones, the "hot potato" was carried by the on-call engineer. Any actual time worked outside of core-working hours was paid back in the form of time-off-in-lieu. The salary generously reflected the being on-call requirement. The other factor was that a "call-out" was not completed until the root cause was fixed. I believe the real reason for the compassionate arrangements was that the owners of the business were former engineers and were even available to escalate calls to them if you got stuck. Our personal phones had everybody else's personal numbers in the address book, but we were never permitted to give them out to clients. Clients only had access to the "hot potato" phone numbers, which also received the various paged alerts, etc.

Fire-Dragon-DoL 4y ago
I don't think time off is enough,unless with a multiplier. 1 hour of on call task at 4am will affect the entire day, possibly the next one
- muttled 4y ago
  And your health. Getting woken up often is not good for your heart!