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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 hourl

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.
    - rajamaka 4y ago
      The point still stands whether they try to force you or not. I'm constantly amazed by the lack of boundaries some people in this industry entertain.
    - muttled 4y ago
      I had an awful manager who insisted I needed to "see if I can find someone to cover" for me for a funeral.
      - Sohcahtoa82 4y ago
        I'd tell them that's their job as a manager.
- piva00 4y ago
  > 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. And just to pile on that even more: also dreading that you might not wake up if the page/call comes during the heaviest hours of your sleep. It's happened to me, I felt awfully guilty for not waking up after a gruelling work day and some pages early in the evening. I was tired and had been asleep for around 2 hours, didn't wake up and the escalation policy took it up to my manager... I didn't get reprimanded or had any bad consequence from it, still the guilt made me feel like a failure and increased my anxiety when I'm on-call.
  - registeredcorn 4y ago
    >still the guilt made me feel like a failure and increased my anxiety when I'm on-call. I don't know if this will help with your mindset at all, but as someone who's been listed as the secondary if the first responder doesn't answer: I really wouldn't beat yourself up over it. Self-correction is fine, but try not to let it drag you down too far. We have the same worries too. Our worries are usually "Crud. If I don't pick up, then it's either going to (big boss) or the customer is going to be firing off nasty emails in the morning and dragging me into some stupid meeting." The cause of why we're being paged doesn't really come into play. At most, I might just send a text or whatever to the first responder, to make sure that they're okay. "What if they aren't responding because they were in a car accident?" If you have a good manager - and it sounds like you do, since you weren't reprimanded for performing a fundemental human function - then they are probably doing their best to look out for you and your interests. When people talk about "not being the boss" or "working as a team" or whatever, generally what they're trying to get at is that "They have your back". They've been in your position and have probably felt that same crush of emotion and worry that you might deal with. They are meant to be the final filter, in a hierarchy of filters, to protect you from those outside elements which ruin your ability to work effectively. If you put in a sincere effort at your job, you have nothing to feel guilty over. That might be easier said than done, but it really is true. It just might take some time and practice to be able to forgive yourself when you make a mistake. And if you feel like you could be doing a better job at this, or at that, then you just need to permit yourself the time to improve on that thing, and to remind yourself that you are allowed to mess up from time to time. It's about how you learn from those things.
- cube2222 4y ago
  You're using "never" everywhere here. That is in my opinion the main red flag here. On-call should be at most one week in four-six. Moreover, with a healthy on-call culture (where stuff is fixed, and alerts happen rarely in practice), usually you can pass/swap on-call to others for an evening, or for an afternoon, or for a weekend, as almost always there is somebody who's plan is "sitting at home" and nobody minds having the pager in such circumstances if it almost never pages outside of working hours.
  - Sodman 4y ago
    The company having that much influence over your day-to-day life during non-business hours every fourth week is an enormous burden. I would want at least 50% higher overall total annual comp to even consider that schedule, and even then it's still only a maybe.
  - alistairSH 4y ago
    almost always there is somebody who's plan is "sitting at home" and nobody minds having the pager in such circumstances I wonder if this is an American attitude that exists primarily because we (collectively) have allowed our employers to demand this of us? Personally, I hate being on call. Most weekends, I spend at least 6 hours cycling. Sometimes significantly more. I go camping regularly. I go kayaking regularly. If I don't spend time outdoors, my mental health declines (really, ask my wife, she kicks me out if I sit around the house too long because I turn into a cranky butthead). Most evenings after work, I run/cycle/hike. I have to run errands. Walk the dog (usually 2 miles). This is all part of my normal "not doing anything special" time at home. None of which is easily doable if I'm on call. Fortunately, I've managed to build a career in a place where on-call rarely exists.
    - jerf 4y ago
      I believe the point was more than if you have a team of, say, ten people, there's always someone who is not busy for some given night, and there's some reasonable trade that can be worked out, the moreso if oncall risk is considered low by the team. Obviously as you scale down that becomes less true.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- formerkrogemp 4y ago
  > Finally, somewhere that I fully agree with. I think we could all stand to learn a bit from the Finnish and the Norwegians.
Hamuko 4y ago
I've definitely seen on-call compensation implemented differently than stated in the collective agreement. And not in the positive direction. Thankfully it wasn't mandatory, so it was a very definite possibility to not opt in.
morelisp 4y ago
This is incredible; at our German company we get 0.1x/1.5x. (Though we also don't promise response times that would interrupt e.g. grocery shopping.)
- kazen44 4y ago
  having resonable response times make a huge difference in being oncall. in my experience, most employer seem to think responding within 30minutes or so is doable, and i tend to agree with them. Usually makes it possible for you to just do things around the house/ in your life, and not having to rush back home when you run into an oncall issue.
  - morelisp 4y ago
    In our case it's one hour, essentially based on "what if my home internet doesn't work and I have to get to the actual office to start responding, how long will it take me to get there from anywhere in the city." You don't go on vacation or plan your wedding, but otherwise your day is pretty normal. I can't imagine less than 30 minutes.

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.
  - rajamaka 4y ago
    The point still stands whether they try to force you or not. I'm constantly amazed by the lack of boundaries some people in this industry entertain.
  - muttled 4y ago
    I had an awful manager who insisted I needed to "see if I can find someone to cover" for me for a funeral.
    - Sohcahtoa82 4y ago
      I'd tell them that's their job as a manager.
piva00 4y ago
> 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. And just to pile on that even more: also dreading that you might not wake up if the page/call comes during the heaviest hours of your sleep. It's happened to me, I felt awfully guilty for not waking up after a gruelling work day and some pages early in the evening. I was tired and had been asleep for around 2 hours, didn't wake up and the escalation policy took it up to my manager... I didn't get reprimanded or had any bad consequence from it, still the guilt made me feel like a failure and increased my anxiety when I'm on-call.
- registeredcorn 4y ago
  >still the guilt made me feel like a failure and increased my anxiety when I'm on-call. I don't know if this will help with your mindset at all, but as someone who's been listed as the secondary if the first responder doesn't answer: I really wouldn't beat yourself up over it. Self-correction is fine, but try not to let it drag you down too far. We have the same worries too. Our worries are usually "Crud. If I don't pick up, then it's either going to (big boss) or the customer is going to be firing off nasty emails in the morning and dragging me into some stupid meeting." The cause of why we're being paged doesn't really come into play. At most, I might just send a text or whatever to the first responder, to make sure that they're okay. "What if they aren't responding because they were in a car accident?" If you have a good manager - and it sounds like you do, since you weren't reprimanded for performing a fundemental human function - then they are probably doing their best to look out for you and your interests. When people talk about "not being the boss" or "working as a team" or whatever, generally what they're trying to get at is that "They have your back". They've been in your position and have probably felt that same crush of emotion and worry that you might deal with. They are meant to be the final filter, in a hierarchy of filters, to protect you from those outside elements which ruin your ability to work effectively. If you put in a sincere effort at your job, you have nothing to feel guilty over. That might be easier said than done, but it really is true. It just might take some time and practice to be able to forgive yourself when you make a mistake. And if you feel like you could be doing a better job at this, or at that, then you just need to permit yourself the time to improve on that thing, and to remind yourself that you are allowed to mess up from time to time. It's about how you learn from those things.
cube2222 4y ago
You're using "never" everywhere here. That is in my opinion the main red flag here. On-call should be at most one week in four-six. Moreover, with a healthy on-call culture (where stuff is fixed, and alerts happen rarely in practice), usually you can pass/swap on-call to others for an evening, or for an afternoon, or for a weekend, as almost always there is somebody who's plan is "sitting at home" and nobody minds having the pager in such circumstances if it almost never pages outside of working hours.
- Sodman 4y ago
  The company having that much influence over your day-to-day life during non-business hours every fourth week is an enormous burden. I would want at least 50% higher overall total annual comp to even consider that schedule, and even then it's still only a maybe.
- alistairSH 4y ago
  almost always there is somebody who's plan is "sitting at home" and nobody minds having the pager in such circumstances I wonder if this is an American attitude that exists primarily because we (collectively) have allowed our employers to demand this of us? Personally, I hate being on call. Most weekends, I spend at least 6 hours cycling. Sometimes significantly more. I go camping regularly. I go kayaking regularly. If I don't spend time outdoors, my mental health declines (really, ask my wife, she kicks me out if I sit around the house too long because I turn into a cranky butthead). Most evenings after work, I run/cycle/hike. I have to run errands. Walk the dog (usually 2 miles). This is all part of my normal "not doing anything special" time at home. None of which is easily doable if I'm on call. Fortunately, I've managed to build a career in a place where on-call rarely exists.
  - jerf 4y ago
    I believe the point was more than if you have a team of, say, ten people, there's always someone who is not busy for some given night, and there's some reasonable trade that can be worked out, the moreso if oncall risk is considered low by the team. Obviously as you scale down that becomes less true.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
formerkrogemp 4y ago
> Finally, somewhere that I fully agree with. I think we could all stand to learn a bit from the Finnish and the Norwegians.

Hamuko 4y ago

I've definitely seen on-call compensation implemented differently than stated in the collective agreement. And not in the positive direction. Thankfully it wasn't mandatory, so it was a very definite possibility to not opt in.

morelisp 4y ago

This is incredible; at our German company we get 0.1x/1.5x. (Though we also don't promise response times that would interrupt e.g. grocery shopping.)

kazen44 4y ago
having resonable response times make a huge difference in being oncall. in my experience, most employer seem to think responding within 30minutes or so is doable, and i tend to agree with them. Usually makes it possible for you to just do things around the house/ in your life, and not having to rush back home when you run into an oncall issue.
- morelisp 4y ago
  In our case it's one hour, essentially based on "what if my home internet doesn't work and I have to get to the actual office to start responding, how long will it take me to get there from anywhere in the city." You don't go on vacation or plan your wedding, but otherwise your day is pretty normal. I can't imagine less than 30 minutes.