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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

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.
avgcorrection 4y ago
"never" just means exactly when you are on-call. And holy moly! One whole week of being on-call is way too much.
PeterisP 4y ago
IMHO the whole notion of "week of on-call" is ridiculous. Being on-call ready is a shift of (hopefully low-intensity) work time. You can do 8 hour shifts, 12 hour shifts, 24 hour shifts, but you can't do 168 hour shifts for monitoring something, anything - that's impractical and should be illegal. There are (or should be) some minimum standards of rest time that every human being must get, and being on-call is not it, every employee must get an opportunity to fully disconnect for non-trivial time during every single week. You do your shift, and then get at least 12 hours off (with your phone off) before being available for work or work calls again.
- niij 4y ago
  On-call is meant to be for rare emergencies. If you're getting paged outside of work hours on each 1 week shift then something is wrong. It should in no way be equivalent to 168 hours of work.
  - xur17 4y ago
    Agreed. I feel like there are significantly different "on call" expectations being discussed in the comments for this post.
  - PeterisP 4y ago
    If there is an obligation to respond within a certain time, and an obligation to avoid certain activities (whatever you imagine that makes you unable to respond) then those are work hours even if nobody calls. It's exactly like a fireighter shift or call center shift where there happen to be no incoming calls, or a night shift at a remote gas station if no customers come during that night. And if you're getting paged outside of work hours, then there's zero obligation to answer your phone. There's no middle ground. If the employer says that these aren't working hours, they have zero right to ask what you're doing at these hours, much less put any conditions on it; it's your right to spend that time fishing in a remote lake with no cell phone service or go on a date or whatever and not even explain anything without any reprimand when you arrive at your scheduled start of work time; and if they want you to commit to a shift, well, "a shift" where employer tells you what to do (e.g. do not go fishing to a remote lake and don't sleep for 12 hours with your phone off) is by definition work hours. It is quite plausible that most of the times most employees will pick up the phone and solve reasonable issues, but that's an extra courtesy from the employee, going beyond what you can demand or expect; but the moment you start to require that, or ask an employee to precommit that they will definitely be monitoring their phone for rapid response, that means you're effectively assigning those hours as work hours. It's understandable that being on-call can be very light work in many cases (not all - quite a few counterexamples in this discussion), so you can agree on different compensation for them, but those definitely are work hours (they definitely aren't non-work hours, and there is no middle ground) and thus any rules on length of shifts and rest between shifts can and should apply also for on-call 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.

avgcorrection 4y ago

"never" just means exactly when you are on-call. And holy moly! One whole week of being on-call is way too much.

PeterisP 4y ago

IMHO the whole notion of "week of on-call" is ridiculous. Being on-call ready is a shift of (hopefully low-intensity) work time. You can do 8 hour shifts, 12 hour shifts, 24 hour shifts, but you can't do 168 hour shifts for monitoring something, anything - that's impractical and should be illegal. There are (or should be) some minimum standards of rest time that every human being must get, and being on-call is not it, every employee must get an opportunity to fully disconnect for non-trivial time during every single week. You do your shift, and then get at least 12 hours off (with your phone off) before being available for work or work calls again.

niij 4y ago
On-call is meant to be for rare emergencies. If you're getting paged outside of work hours on each 1 week shift then something is wrong. It should in no way be equivalent to 168 hours of work.
- xur17 4y ago
  Agreed. I feel like there are significantly different "on call" expectations being discussed in the comments for this post.
- PeterisP 4y ago
  If there is an obligation to respond within a certain time, and an obligation to avoid certain activities (whatever you imagine that makes you unable to respond) then those are work hours even if nobody calls. It's exactly like a fireighter shift or call center shift where there happen to be no incoming calls, or a night shift at a remote gas station if no customers come during that night. And if you're getting paged outside of work hours, then there's zero obligation to answer your phone. There's no middle ground. If the employer says that these aren't working hours, they have zero right to ask what you're doing at these hours, much less put any conditions on it; it's your right to spend that time fishing in a remote lake with no cell phone service or go on a date or whatever and not even explain anything without any reprimand when you arrive at your scheduled start of work time; and if they want you to commit to a shift, well, "a shift" where employer tells you what to do (e.g. do not go fishing to a remote lake and don't sleep for 12 hours with your phone off) is by definition work hours. It is quite plausible that most of the times most employees will pick up the phone and solve reasonable issues, but that's an extra courtesy from the employee, going beyond what you can demand or expect; but the moment you start to require that, or ask an employee to precommit that they will definitely be monitoring their phone for rapid response, that means you're effectively assigning those hours as work hours. It's understandable that being on-call can be very light work in many cases (not all - quite a few counterexamples in this discussion), so you can agree on different compensation for them, but those definitely are work hours (they definitely aren't non-work hours, and there is no middle ground) and thus any rules on length of shifts and rest between shifts can and should apply also for on-call hours.