8 ms·

On-call is just fine as long as: 1. There is a rotation. 2. There are few pages, preferably the median should be 0 per week. 3. Spurious / non-actionable ale

On-call is just fine as long as: 1. There is a rotation. 2. There are few pages, preferably the median should be 0 per week. 3. Spurious / non-actionable alerts get fixed right away (with very high priority) 4. You're not up more than 1 week per 1-1.5 month. 5. You subtract middle of the night pages from your next working day, with bad nights resulting in a day off. Being on-call doesn't mean working overtime. As with most things, the core idea is not bad, it's the execution that matters.

Broken_Hippo 4y ago
6. You are paid an amount for every hour of being on-call. This should be on top of your base pay. This is important. If you are on-call, you do not have the freedom that you would otherwise have and you should be compensated for this.
- cube2222 4y ago
  If it's in the contract you sign, then it's already priced in. I don't see much value in specifically outlining which part is base and which is for oncall, if oncall is mandatory.
  - ggeorgovassilis 4y ago
    Surcharge for on-call activity is an incentive for the organisation to minimise on-call. If I ask my boss for resources to automate operations, he's going to measure that against the cost caused by on-call activity. If there's a flat-rate cost for on-call, the organisation has one incentive less to improve operations and reduce incident count.
  - Sankozi 4y ago
    If contract says how many on call hours are per month then agree. Usually those hours are harder to predict compared to working hours so it is much easier to pay for them outside of typical monthly salary.
  - Broken_Hippo 4y ago
    Because if you are supposed to be prepared for sudden work outside your normal work hours, you should be compensated outside of your standard pay. Period. And sure, it is priced in because the companies can get away with it. This doesn't mean it is right or fair as the price is always going to be in the company's favor and rarely fair to the employee. For example: My brother worked for a US railroad. He didn't have a set schedule. Instead, he got 10 hours rest after a shift and then he was on call. They only closed down on Christmas and New Year's. You were expected to do this on-call work perpetually. The money was good for the area as were the benefits. They advertised in depressed areas without much opportunity, so it made it easier to prey on folks that will accept the poor treatment. I'm pretty sure having to pay folks for each of those hours would change the behavior of the company in the employee's favor. So yeah, even one hour of 'on-call' should be paid extra, outside of your basepay. Even for companies and industries that aren't being actively evil so that it doesn't happen in the future.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - throwaddzuzxd 4y ago
    French here. My contract says that if on-calls are needed, I might have to be in the rotation. This clause increases my pay rate even if I'm not on-call. If however I am actually on-call, I am paid more. And if the on-call rings, I'm again paid more on top of the on-call period. And as the French law mandates 11 consecutive hours of rest, if the on-call rings in the middle of the night, I'll usually come to work later the day after. If you don't have advantages for being on-call, you're the one being taken advantage of.
  - falcolas 4y ago
    In a US state with at-will employment, on call can be added to an existing contract without additional pay - continued employment is considered to be sufficient "consideration" on the company's part.
- stevekemp 4y ago
  The Finnish collective agreement, which covers IT workers, spells this out explicitly: * For every hour you're available for on-call you get your regular hourly rate. * For every incident, which involves you working, you receive twice your hourly salary for the duration. So companies based her tend to have that as standard, though I'm sure some companies would pay more to stand out.
  - nickjj 4y ago
    Finally, somewhere that I fully agree with. Being on-call while you do not get called upon is 24 / 7 work because you have to live your entire life around being available. Like the blog post mentions, grocery shopping has implications because if you happen to have an on-call event while shopping it means leaving your cart to run to your car to address the situation because you can't leave your house without your work laptop. It means never going to the beach alone on a Saturday because while you could bring your laptop with you, if you go swimming and there's an on-call event you can't address it because you have no way to get notified while you're swimming in the ocean. It also means going to the movies with an expectation that if you get called 15 minutes into the movie you're leaving. Likewise, if you're mid-date and get called you're out of luck. It means never enjoying being able to walk around while being disconnected from the world. It means if you're at your mom's funeral giving a eulogy you leave mid-speech to address PagerDuty. Then there's knowing at any given second your phone can notify you of an event and you have to put the volume at maximum and place it right next to your face every night with an expectation that you could be woken up at any second.
    - id 4y ago
      >It means if you're at your mom's funeral giving a eulogy you leave mid-speech to address PagerDuty. You should not be on-call while you're at your mom's funeral, period.
      - Broken_Hippo 4y ago
        While I agree totally that you Shouldn't be, we all know that some places will try to force this on you.
- __alexs 4y ago
  This is also an excellent way to incentivise the business to actually build resilient systems that minimise the need for on-call hours.
  - tartoran 4y ago
    Yes! On call should be expensive for the company so over time the systems become stronger.
- zimpenfish 4y ago
  At one place I worked, they were wanting on-call shifts of 12 hours being no more than 15 minutes away from being logged on (it was a multi-week Big Event) with the promise of, maybe, time off in lieu as recompense. They were most displeased when I declined this opportunity.
- matsemann 4y ago
  Also, only on on-call for things you're actually responsible for. I hate having on-calls span multiple teams. They can then be lazy, as their issues hurts someone else. And the added stress of having to debug and fix shit you're not comfortable touching. Additionally, I'll never accept on-call with 15 minutes from alert to being on a computer again. It's just too limiting and disruptive of my life. Have to bring the computer everywhere. Any dinner or social event can be instantly ruined. A workout becomes meaningless. I remember doing a swim and having to check my phone every 5 minutes. It's mentally exhausting and frankly not worth the pay.
- TheSoftwareGuy 4y ago
  7. If you are on-call during a holiday, you get an extra vacation day. This is impoprtant because if you are on-call, you are working, and if it is during a holiday, then that is one less holiday for you. This could actually be pretty good too. People would be much more willing to cover for others on holidays
chronid 4y ago
I would add a "there is time reserved to write automation to reduce toil". I have a fair bit of experience in teams with developers hating oncall and the critical issues happen in two camps generally: - In some cases the org was absolutely open to give them time to resolve issues and automate stuff away (PMs were proposing months for fixes only, and cleaning up boards, etc), there just was no interest until enough escalation happened (creating a massive conflict between ops and devs in the meantime). Even offering to do the work was met with a "stay in your lane" kind of response and no collaboration at all. - In others the company just did not care, deprioritized tickets until things blew up completely, then finger pointing started and all that nice toxic bullshit.
marssaxman 4y ago
On-call means you have to plan your free time around being available to work. That's never going to be "just fine" for some of us, no matter how it's structured.
mancerayder 4y ago
> 4. You're not up more than 1 week per 1-1.5 month. That's insane. That's around 20% of your life.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
powerhour 4y ago
n+1: The people that wrote the code and designed the systems are the first to be paged. Their work, their disrupted sleep.
throwk8s 4y ago
> 4. You're not up more than 1 week per 1-1.5 month. That seems excessive if you're expected to be able to log into your work system within X minutes. Having to be essentially home, near a computer, 25% of the time (1 week out of 4) is a pretty heavy burden, especially for people who prefer to be out, rather than home.
- SpicyLemonZest 4y ago
  It's a heavy burden, and a lot of teams might want to consider a longer interval, but there's a lot of legitimate scenarios where it's just not feasible to distribute an oncall rotation among 8+ people. I would definitely point more towards 1 in 6 as the ideal minimum.
- cube2222 4y ago
  I just carry around a laptop in my backpack when I'm on call.
BeetleB 4y ago
> There are few pages, preferably the median should be 0 per week. In interviews, always ask them: 1. How often is someone on call (typical was one week every 6-8 weeks). 2. While on call, how often do you get paged after hours? 3. What do you do to reduce the number of pages? I suspect I've been rejected for merely asking the second and third question, but that's good!

Broken_Hippo 4y ago

6. You are paid an amount for every hour of being on-call. This should be on top of your base pay. This is important. If you are on-call, you do not have the freedom that you would otherwise have and you should be compensated for this.

cube2222 4y ago
If it's in the contract you sign, then it's already priced in. I don't see much value in specifically outlining which part is base and which is for oncall, if oncall is mandatory.
- ggeorgovassilis 4y ago
  Surcharge for on-call activity is an incentive for the organisation to minimise on-call. If I ask my boss for resources to automate operations, he's going to measure that against the cost caused by on-call activity. If there's a flat-rate cost for on-call, the organisation has one incentive less to improve operations and reduce incident count.
- Sankozi 4y ago
  If contract says how many on call hours are per month then agree. Usually those hours are harder to predict compared to working hours so it is much easier to pay for them outside of typical monthly salary.
- Broken_Hippo 4y ago
  Because if you are supposed to be prepared for sudden work outside your normal work hours, you should be compensated outside of your standard pay. Period. And sure, it is priced in because the companies can get away with it. This doesn't mean it is right or fair as the price is always going to be in the company's favor and rarely fair to the employee. For example: My brother worked for a US railroad. He didn't have a set schedule. Instead, he got 10 hours rest after a shift and then he was on call. They only closed down on Christmas and New Year's. You were expected to do this on-call work perpetually. The money was good for the area as were the benefits. They advertised in depressed areas without much opportunity, so it made it easier to prey on folks that will accept the poor treatment. I'm pretty sure having to pay folks for each of those hours would change the behavior of the company in the employee's favor. So yeah, even one hour of 'on-call' should be paid extra, outside of your basepay. Even for companies and industries that aren't being actively evil so that it doesn't happen in the future.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- throwaddzuzxd 4y ago
  French here. My contract says that if on-calls are needed, I might have to be in the rotation. This clause increases my pay rate even if I'm not on-call. If however I am actually on-call, I am paid more. And if the on-call rings, I'm again paid more on top of the on-call period. And as the French law mandates 11 consecutive hours of rest, if the on-call rings in the middle of the night, I'll usually come to work later the day after. If you don't have advantages for being on-call, you're the one being taken advantage of.
- falcolas 4y ago
  In a US state with at-will employment, on call can be added to an existing contract without additional pay - continued employment is considered to be sufficient "consideration" on the company's part.
stevekemp 4y ago
The Finnish collective agreement, which covers IT workers, spells this out explicitly: * For every hour you're available for on-call you get your regular hourly rate. * For every incident, which involves you working, you receive twice your hourly salary for the duration. So companies based her tend to have that as standard, though I'm sure some companies would pay more to stand out.
- nickjj 4y ago
  Finally, somewhere that I fully agree with. Being on-call while you do not get called upon is 24 / 7 work because you have to live your entire life around being available. Like the blog post mentions, grocery shopping has implications because if you happen to have an on-call event while shopping it means leaving your cart to run to your car to address the situation because you can't leave your house without your work laptop. It means never going to the beach alone on a Saturday because while you could bring your laptop with you, if you go swimming and there's an on-call event you can't address it because you have no way to get notified while you're swimming in the ocean. It also means going to the movies with an expectation that if you get called 15 minutes into the movie you're leaving. Likewise, if you're mid-date and get called you're out of luck. It means never enjoying being able to walk around while being disconnected from the world. It means if you're at your mom's funeral giving a eulogy you leave mid-speech to address PagerDuty. Then there's knowing at any given second your phone can notify you of an event and you have to put the volume at maximum and place it right next to your face every night with an expectation that you could be woken up at any second.
  - id 4y ago
    >It means if you're at your mom's funeral giving a eulogy you leave mid-speech to address PagerDuty. You should not be on-call while you're at your mom's funeral, period.
    - Broken_Hippo 4y ago
      While I agree totally that you Shouldn't be, we all know that some places will try to force this on you.
__alexs 4y ago
This is also an excellent way to incentivise the business to actually build resilient systems that minimise the need for on-call hours.
- tartoran 4y ago
  Yes! On call should be expensive for the company so over time the systems become stronger.
zimpenfish 4y ago
At one place I worked, they were wanting on-call shifts of 12 hours being no more than 15 minutes away from being logged on (it was a multi-week Big Event) with the promise of, maybe, time off in lieu as recompense. They were most displeased when I declined this opportunity.
matsemann 4y ago
Also, only on on-call for things you're actually responsible for. I hate having on-calls span multiple teams. They can then be lazy, as their issues hurts someone else. And the added stress of having to debug and fix shit you're not comfortable touching. Additionally, I'll never accept on-call with 15 minutes from alert to being on a computer again. It's just too limiting and disruptive of my life. Have to bring the computer everywhere. Any dinner or social event can be instantly ruined. A workout becomes meaningless. I remember doing a swim and having to check my phone every 5 minutes. It's mentally exhausting and frankly not worth the pay.
TheSoftwareGuy 4y ago
7. If you are on-call during a holiday, you get an extra vacation day. This is impoprtant because if you are on-call, you are working, and if it is during a holiday, then that is one less holiday for you. This could actually be pretty good too. People would be much more willing to cover for others on holidays

chronid 4y ago

I would add a "there is time reserved to write automation to reduce toil". I have a fair bit of experience in teams with developers hating oncall and the critical issues happen in two camps generally: - In some cases the org was absolutely open to give them time to resolve issues and automate stuff away (PMs were proposing months for fixes only, and cleaning up boards, etc), there just was no interest until enough escalation happened (creating a massive conflict between ops and devs in the meantime). Even offering to do the work was met with a "stay in your lane" kind of response and no collaboration at all. - In others the company just did not care, deprioritized tickets until things blew up completely, then finger pointing started and all that nice toxic bullshit.

marssaxman 4y ago

On-call means you have to plan your free time around being available to work. That's never going to be "just fine" for some of us, no matter how it's structured.

mancerayder 4y ago

> 4. You're not up more than 1 week per 1-1.5 month. That's insane. That's around 20% of your life.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

powerhour 4y ago

n+1: The people that wrote the code and designed the systems are the first to be paged. Their work, their disrupted sleep.

throwk8s 4y ago

> 4. You're not up more than 1 week per 1-1.5 month. That seems excessive if you're expected to be able to log into your work system within X minutes. Having to be essentially home, near a computer, 25% of the time (1 week out of 4) is a pretty heavy burden, especially for people who prefer to be out, rather than home.

SpicyLemonZest 4y ago
It's a heavy burden, and a lot of teams might want to consider a longer interval, but there's a lot of legitimate scenarios where it's just not feasible to distribute an oncall rotation among 8+ people. I would definitely point more towards 1 in 6 as the ideal minimum.
cube2222 4y ago
I just carry around a laptop in my backpack when I'm on call.

BeetleB 4y ago

> There are few pages, preferably the median should be 0 per week. In interviews, always ask them: 1. How often is someone on call (typical was one week every 6-8 weeks). 2. While on call, how often do you get paged after hours? 3. What do you do to reduce the number of pages? I suspect I've been rejected for merely asking the second and third question, but that's good!