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Google's oncall compensation structure is phenomenal. For tier 1 oncall (5m response time), for each hour oncall outside of working hours, you are compensated
by cbarrick 4y ago
Google's oncall compensation structure is phenomenal.
For tier 1 oncall (5m response time), for each hour oncall outside of working hours, you are compensated for 40 minutes, which you can either take as time off or at your current pay rate (i.e. you are compensated at 2/3 your usual pay).
For tier 2 oncall (30m response time), the compensation is 20 minutes per hour outside of working hours.
For a tier 1 rotation, the team has a staffing requirement of 12 people, split between two sites. There's a max of 80h oncall, outside of working hours, per person per quarter. Because oncall is split between sites, you are never oncall overnight.
- nighthawk454 4y agoBetter than Amazon, where you get nothing extra. And often do regular duties during on call as well. Kind of nuts. The saving grace is a lot of teams aren’t really doing anything that critical, so the on call is more a formality bc that’s what real teams do. Still pointlessly stressful but less serious.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- 52358 4y agoMeta is the same, it can suck. I was on a team that got down to 4 eng once and everyone was oncall for a week each month.
- leaflets2 4y agoHow were you compensated if I can ask?
- science4sail 4y agoMeta doesn't have any oncall compensation; it's like Amazon.
- marssaxman 4y agoWow, that's inhumane.
- vhgyu75e6u 4y agoThat depends of the country and its regulation. I get pay extra for my week as oncall, plus a bit for each page outside of working hours. As for the oncall responsabilities, we take it as time to catch up on debt or open tickets, no project work is assigned that week.
- stevekemp 4y agoSimilar story here, 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.
- leaflets2 4y agoWhy have anyone on call in Finland then? If the companies pay full salaries anyway, can't they ask the person to work as usual then (Or is there a 40 h/week limit or night work rules or something that prevents that?)
- stevekemp 4y agoThere are limits on working hours, but I guess the reason is obvious as elsewhere. You have your team of 20+ developers/sysadmins working Mon-Fri, 9am-5pm, and then you have a single individual responding to on-call events outside those hours.
- mrep 4y agoSo you are actually paid 4.2x (24*7/40) for oncall weeks? That sounds way too good to be true.
- stevekemp 4y agoAssume an average rate of €10/hour, with a working week of 37.5 hours, that gives you an income of €375. If you're working 7.5 hours a day, you're on-call for 16.5 hours Mon-Fri, and 24 hours for Sat/Sun. That gives a total of (( 16.55 + 48 ) 10) = €1350. So yes, you get paid a lot. (Of course the hourly salary there was low to simplify the numbers, but you can see the income for working a week on-call is about the same as working three normal weeks.)
- throwaway019254 4y ago> The saving grace is a lot of teams aren’t really doing anything that critical I worked for AWS, and our service was critical for like half of the internet. Very hard oncalls.
- Cyph0n 4y ago> Because oncall is split between sites, you are never oncall overnight. Doesn’t this only apply to SRE rotations? The dev teams I know of are definitely oncall overnight.
- fishywang 4y agothat only applies to tier 1 oncall. if they are oncall overnight they are most definitely tier 2.
- Cyph0n 4y agoAh, that makes sense!
- Morgawr 4y agoGoogler here, was SRE on tier 2 (not SRE anymore). Tier 2 is still "proper" oncall and we were split between sites. I think devs would be tier 3 oncall instead which has no compensation and no expectation of a certain prompt response time (also SLAs and other metrics might be different since they usually aren't an SRE team). In that case tier 3 rotations wouldn't be handled by SREs and would likely not be split across sites (since dev teams aren't usually). There may be exceptions, and I've never been in a dev team myself although I interacted with many so I might be wrong, but I can't recall ever seeing a tier 2 oncall SRE team not having a site split and having people 24/7 oncall overnight. Just my personal experience.
- fishywang 4y agoAt least at 2016, when I left Google, my team was tier 2 with weekly rotation (but we were onboarding sre support at the time, so it might change to 8-hour rotation later).
- sbrother 4y agoMy team (SWE) does a week-long tier 2 oncall shift ~every 6 weeks. It's very disruptive to my life (although it doesn't seem to bother people without young kids or with stay-at-home partners). I would flat out refuse a team with more frequent oncall, even if it were tier 3.
- soneca 4y agoI always assumed that pay for hours outside of regular working hours would be higher than regular pay.
- hbhakhra 4y agoThe pay for outside working hours applies whether or not you are getting paged. That's 128 hours / 3 = 42.67 hours of extra pay during an on call week. The on call week also gives incentive to fix technical debt and build a more stable production system so you don't get paged.
- soneca 4y agoYeah, makes sense. Forgot the detail that most of on call hours are not strictly working. So Google scheme seems fair
- geraldwhen 4y agoWaiting to work is working. Would a hospital surgeon only charge for time holding a knife? Don’t be absurd.
- joshuamorton 4y agoIf I'm at home cooking dinner, I'm not "waiting to work" though. Yes, you cannot go on a hike, which is why you get paid. You don't get paid more than you do for your normal time working though.
- shadowofneptune 4y agoHospitals do not pay more than normal work hours for on-call, though they do usually pay some amount. https://physiciansthrive.com/physician-compensation/on-call-pay-physicians/ https://physiciansthrive.com/physician-compensation/on-call-...
- soneca 4y agoAbsurd analogy. My point is that I think it’s fair to pay less than regular hour pay when you are “waiting to work”. I also think it’s fair to pay more than regular hour pay when you are working outside of regular working hours.
- sidlls 4y ago“Phenomenal”? Hardly. The base expectation outside of tech is time-and-a-half for each hour over 8 in a day, or 40 in a week.
- dasil003 4y agoFor actual work, not for being on call with the expectation that most of the time nothing will go wrong
- vageli 4y agoDo firemen also not work given that a considerable amount of their time is spent waiting for a call?
- stickfigure 4y agoProfessional firefighters spend a lot of their "waiting" time training, writing reports, fixing the apparatus, sharpening shovels, cleaning chainsaws, etc. It isn't the same.
- ok_dad 4y agoFor a 5m on call time, I would literally have to be sitting at my computer with slack open reading hacker news. Yes, it’s basically the same thing.
- noodleman 4y agoI'm currently on call. A 5 minute response time means to respond to the call out and start working on it. If you're on call, you should have a suitable WFH setup and it should be on standby, so 5 minutes is ample time. It doesn't means you have to have it resolved within 5 minutes of being called out, that would be absurd.
- ok_dad 4y ago
- babyshake 4y agoI would say it makes sense to make the oncall pay based on the number of pages you get or some other metric but that would just create some unwanted incentives and problems. It's probably good to think of paying engineers for oncall time they are not spending putting out fires as a form of reward for setting up their systems to be reliable.
- cbarrick 4y agoThat's a pretty perverse incentive. Why fix the thing if I get paid more if it's broken? Why tune the pager to be quiet if noise equals cash? The pager should be tuned to your SLOs, and you should be incentivized to exceed those SLOs.
- HowTheStoryEnds 4y agoBecause at a certain point: time > cash.
- dbcurtis 4y agoMy data is pretty old, old enough that the person on call carried a pager (remember those?), but very similar comp structure. I remember, because the on-call costs hit my budget directly. 1. Time on-call was paid at 25% of normal hourly rate. (Maybe holiday premium boosted the base rate? I can't remember.) 2. Issue-resolution pay was the normal overtime rate, including shift premium and holiday premium, from the time the pager went off until the issue was cleared. 3. The person on call had to: a) be able to get to the plant in 20 minutes, if necessary, but remote support was perfectly fine and paid the same. Only resolving the issue mattered, not where you did it. 4. The person on call had to remain sober and work-ready the entire time on call. It's 3 & 4 that justify the 25% pay for carrying a pager. Friend having a party? I'll have cranberry juice, thanks. Fresh snow in Tahoe? I'll have to miss it this weekend. Restricting someone's movements and social life without compensation is simply abusive. As an industry, we need to stop.
- doubled112 4y agoI had a pager in ~ 2015. Was that a long time ago? Company policy said we had to have different devices on different networks, so the company issued cellphone was one, and the pager was on another provider.
- bluefirebrand 4y agoI'm pretty sure this is just a sign your company is a dinosaur and way behind the times. Why would you pay for a separate pager device and service when every cell phone in the world can receive text messages? Bizarre.
- hurflmurfl 4y agoI think a separate device isn't necessarily that bizarre. If I'm on call, I wouldn't want to now take every notification on my phone as something critical to check immediately. Just react promptly to a separate notification on a separate device. Now, of course, the company could just buy a separate phone, but I'm pretty sure it's cheaper to get a pager and the battery will last much longer too, making it impossible to "forget to charge" the device.
- throwawayg94 4y agoThrowaway for obvious reasons. Google will pay you significant extra money for oncall, with the huge caveat that your management structure has to fight for it. I have worked on three teams at Google over four years. All three had some kind of rotation, and none gave extra compensation. Usually they call it something else -- "emergency contact," "caretaking rotation," etc.
- alberth 4y ago> For tier 1 oncall (5m response time), for each hour oncall outside of working hours, you are compensated for 40 minutes, which you can either take as time off or at your current pay rate (i.e. you are compensated at 2/3 your usual pay). Am I doing this math right… You get comp’ed 26 min for every 1-hour of Tier 1 Oncall? If so, getting paid ~50% seems pretty darn good.
- cbarrick 4y agoNo, for every 60m oncall outside of working hours, we are compensated for 40m. 40/60 == 2/3 So for each hour, we can take either 40m of time off or 40m of pay. In other words, we get paid 66%.
- heavyset_go 4y agoThat's not at all phenomenal when you consider the on call policy dictated by labor laws in other first world countries in Europe, for example. You don't even have to look at other countries when you can look at how on call is structured in other industries, especially those that are unionized, right here in the US. Google isn't even giving employees overtime rates for the work they do on call. It doesn't sound voluntary, either, and where are the handsome on call bonuses?