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> a money-grubbing mercenary Yes, we should all be working for free for the sheer pleasure of changing the world, making VCs and company owners richer, and for

> a money-grubbing mercenary Yes, we should all be working for free for the sheer pleasure of changing the world, making VCs and company owners richer, and for the privilege of working under you. Come on, expecting to be paid for work shouldn’t be a fireable offense or a signal for you to look for a new chump that will accept a worse deal.

bigiain 4y ago
Maybe I worded that badly. My point is that asking for 72 hours compensation for being on call over a weekend is unreasonable, and I will consider you unreasonable for asking that. Saying "No, I was never asked and never agreed to doing on call when I started, and I'm not going to agree to it now." is way way less unreasonable, in fact it's a perfectly reasonable response. Negotiating "more than free but less that 72 hours" is also perfectly reasonable, I'm not looking for "chumps" to do it for free. But if you tell me "2 weeks pay for a weekend of on call or GTFO!" I'm going to encourage you to keep your end of that ultimatum.Being _that_ unreasonable is the thing that's very very close to "a fireable offence" in my opinion. Quite where that line is drawn between "zero" and "72 hours" is certainly arguable, but I'd suggest its somewhat closer to zero than 72. Like I said, personally I've done it for 16 hours or 24 hours, and been happy enough with both. YMMV. I guess it also depends on your experience with how often your on call alerts go off, and how much time is typically spent actually doing anything while on call. For me, the worst I've ever had is for me to get paged once or twice on maybe 30% of my on call weekends, and typically spend less than 10 or 20 mins on the vast majority of those pages, with only very rare times when actual serious time is required, like maybe once or twice a year tops.
- conro1108 4y ago
  It's not clear to me why you think "I refuse to do the thing you're asking me to do" is _less_ reasonable than saying "I will only do the thing you're asking me if you pay me $large_amount" To me, the latter response is perfectly reasonable. There are plenty of tasks that I wouldn't want to do as part of my regular work duties, that I would be happy to do in exchange for the right bonus check. If a manager is looking for someone to perform the task, and they decided to _fire_ an employee because they said "I'd do it for $X" instead of saying "No I won't do it", I'd say that manager was either on a delusional ego trip or looking for another chump to exploit.

bigiain 4y ago

Maybe I worded that badly. My point is that asking for 72 hours compensation for being on call over a weekend is unreasonable, and I will consider you unreasonable for asking that. Saying "No, I was never asked and never agreed to doing on call when I started, and I'm not going to agree to it now." is way way less unreasonable, in fact it's a perfectly reasonable response. Negotiating "more than free but less that 72 hours" is also perfectly reasonable, I'm not looking for "chumps" to do it for free. But if you tell me "2 weeks pay for a weekend of on call or GTFO!" I'm going to encourage you to keep your end of that ultimatum.Being _that_ unreasonable is the thing that's very very close to "a fireable offence" in my opinion. Quite where that line is drawn between "zero" and "72 hours" is certainly arguable, but I'd suggest its somewhat closer to zero than 72. Like I said, personally I've done it for 16 hours or 24 hours, and been happy enough with both. YMMV. I guess it also depends on your experience with how often your on call alerts go off, and how much time is typically spent actually doing anything while on call. For me, the worst I've ever had is for me to get paged once or twice on maybe 30% of my on call weekends, and typically spend less than 10 or 20 mins on the vast majority of those pages, with only very rare times when actual serious time is required, like maybe once or twice a year tops.

conro1108 4y ago
It's not clear to me why you think "I refuse to do the thing you're asking me to do" is _less_ reasonable than saying "I will only do the thing you're asking me if you pay me $large_amount" To me, the latter response is perfectly reasonable. There are plenty of tasks that I wouldn't want to do as part of my regular work duties, that I would be happy to do in exchange for the right bonus check. If a manager is looking for someone to perform the task, and they decided to _fire_ an employee because they said "I'd do it for $X" instead of saying "No I won't do it", I'd say that manager was either on a delusional ego trip or looking for another chump to exploit.