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So many words and none of them include “pay people overtime for working on call”.

dopylitty 4y ago
Exactly this. On call is an abusive practice. If you think your service should be up 24/7 then pay people to be online to take care of it 24/7. Forcing people to sit by their phones/computers 24/7 unpaid waiting for a system to maybe have a problem should be a practice explicitly barred by the FLSA.
- olvy0 4y ago
  Completely agree. My team has on-call duty, but we don't have to do it 24/7, just during business hours. I hope we never get to the point where we're giving support 24/7. Slightly off topic: stdout's On-Call. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OiApm-OFfsY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OiApm-OFfsY
- makestuff 4y ago
  Yeah IMO you either use a follow-the-sun rotation and have staff in multiple parts of the world, hire a dedicated nightshift, or pay OT. If the SRE is unable to solve the issue and needs to page the escalation engineer they should get OT for that if it outside business hours. The whole "oh you got woken up at 3am just log in late" is BS because I still have the same amount of work to do.
- dangerwill 4y ago
  Yeah I went from a job where being oncall meant a LOT of pages but the oncall rota was a follow the sun model and so the oncall shifts just ended up being normal work days where you were just 100% interrupted constantly. I thought this was hell but now that I work at a company with 72 hour long oncall shifts, even though the after-hours page rate is very low (once a month or so), the "always on" feeling is even worse. I am constantly thinking about how abusive this practice is
MacsHeadroom 4y ago
At a unicorn I was paid 1.5x for every on-call hour, even while sleeping. That makes 40 hours in a week and 128 on-call hours worth 1.5x for a total of: 232 paid hours in one week with on-call. That's almost 6 weeks of pay in a single week. Yet we still had to pull teeth to get people to be on-call because of how much it sucks.
- tayo42 4y ago
  Yeah, There's diminishing returns on happiness derived from money. the extra few thousand when Im making 12k a month already doesn't offset it.
sambull 4y ago
Took my company being bought by a european one to get that to happen. On-call for many companies (most I've worked at in the past 23 years) is a borderline abusive practice; and often times they already run the team on fumes.
LenkaBo 4y ago
You're right. And that's the most crucial point!
Ancalagon 4y ago
I think the position "Site Reliability Engineer" has become synonymous with people being perpetually on-call as their job, at least in the U.S. The job is basically just there to put out fires.
jedberg 4y ago
I did on-call for work for 20 years. I just assumed my paycheck needed to cover that hassle. I usually got paid more than other people with similar experience because my job included on-call and theirs didn't. Overtime isn't necessary if expectations are set up front and the salary is boosted accordingly. But yeah, it makes people feel better if you pay them less overall and then give them overtime when they're on-call. It's also better for the company because then the raises are smaller since they're based on the base salary and not the overtime. Honestly I'd rather just get paid a higher salary with expected on-call hours up-front.
- blue039 4y ago
  It’s not about “making them feel better”. It’s about wage theft from workers. If you pay me N extra hours, where N is less than the hours I worked on call then you stole from me. Plain and simple. This should be pursued by rabid labor lawyers and interest at the prevailing 30 year rate should accrue on those dollars hourly until they are paid back. The problem is, of course, the law dictating “exempt workers” was written in a time where the only people that would be exempt were executives with actual million dollars golden parachutes. Now, white collar labor is almost universally exempt allowing the state sanctioned theft of millions of dollars a year by corporations who lobby to keep the laws the same, and promoted by “grind culture” immoral bottom-barrel blood-suckers like PagerDuty. It’s bullshit. You’re suffering from Stockholm syndrome. You’ve somehow managed to say stealing from you is okay because they put some nominal amount of unrelated dollars in front of you.
  - jedberg 4y ago
    It's not stealing if they tell me up front "you will be on call and we expect you to work at least 10 hours a week outside of normal business hours". And then pay me for my time up front as part of my salary. Someone who is on-call should be exempt from overtime if they're not paid hourly and it was clearly communicated up front. I think that's part that's missing. Most jobs don't make that clear up front.

Exactly this. On call is an abusive practice. If you think your service should be up 24/7 then pay people to be online to take care of it 24/7. Forcing people to sit by their phones/computers 24/7 unpaid waiting for a system to maybe have a problem should be a practice explicitly barred by the FLSA.

olvy0 4y ago
Completely agree. My team has on-call duty, but we don't have to do it 24/7, just during business hours. I hope we never get to the point where we're giving support 24/7. Slightly off topic: stdout's On-Call. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OiApm-OFfsY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OiApm-OFfsY
makestuff 4y ago
Yeah IMO you either use a follow-the-sun rotation and have staff in multiple parts of the world, hire a dedicated nightshift, or pay OT. If the SRE is unable to solve the issue and needs to page the escalation engineer they should get OT for that if it outside business hours. The whole "oh you got woken up at 3am just log in late" is BS because I still have the same amount of work to do.
dangerwill 4y ago
Yeah I went from a job where being oncall meant a LOT of pages but the oncall rota was a follow the sun model and so the oncall shifts just ended up being normal work days where you were just 100% interrupted constantly. I thought this was hell but now that I work at a company with 72 hour long oncall shifts, even though the after-hours page rate is very low (once a month or so), the "always on" feeling is even worse. I am constantly thinking about how abusive this practice is

MacsHeadroom 4y ago

At a unicorn I was paid 1.5x for every on-call hour, even while sleeping. That makes 40 hours in a week and 128 on-call hours worth 1.5x for a total of: 232 paid hours in one week with on-call. That's almost 6 weeks of pay in a single week. Yet we still had to pull teeth to get people to be on-call because of how much it sucks.

tayo42 4y ago
Yeah, There's diminishing returns on happiness derived from money. the extra few thousand when Im making 12k a month already doesn't offset it.

sambull 4y ago

Took my company being bought by a european one to get that to happen. On-call for many companies (most I've worked at in the past 23 years) is a borderline abusive practice; and often times they already run the team on fumes.

LenkaBo 4y ago

You're right. And that's the most crucial point!

Ancalagon 4y ago

I think the position "Site Reliability Engineer" has become synonymous with people being perpetually on-call as their job, at least in the U.S. The job is basically just there to put out fires.

jedberg 4y ago

I did on-call for work for 20 years. I just assumed my paycheck needed to cover that hassle. I usually got paid more than other people with similar experience because my job included on-call and theirs didn't. Overtime isn't necessary if expectations are set up front and the salary is boosted accordingly. But yeah, it makes people feel better if you pay them less overall and then give them overtime when they're on-call. It's also better for the company because then the raises are smaller since they're based on the base salary and not the overtime. Honestly I'd rather just get paid a higher salary with expected on-call hours up-front.

blue039 4y ago
It’s not about “making them feel better”. It’s about wage theft from workers. If you pay me N extra hours, where N is less than the hours I worked on call then you stole from me. Plain and simple. This should be pursued by rabid labor lawyers and interest at the prevailing 30 year rate should accrue on those dollars hourly until they are paid back. The problem is, of course, the law dictating “exempt workers” was written in a time where the only people that would be exempt were executives with actual million dollars golden parachutes. Now, white collar labor is almost universally exempt allowing the state sanctioned theft of millions of dollars a year by corporations who lobby to keep the laws the same, and promoted by “grind culture” immoral bottom-barrel blood-suckers like PagerDuty. It’s bullshit. You’re suffering from Stockholm syndrome. You’ve somehow managed to say stealing from you is okay because they put some nominal amount of unrelated dollars in front of you.
- jedberg 4y ago
  It's not stealing if they tell me up front "you will be on call and we expect you to work at least 10 hours a week outside of normal business hours". And then pay me for my time up front as part of my salary. Someone who is on-call should be exempt from overtime if they're not paid hourly and it was clearly communicated up front. I think that's part that's missing. Most jobs don't make that clear up front.