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I much prefer the incentives around time off in lieu for working out of hours, rather than elevated pay. We are paid a base rate just for being on call, it's l

I much prefer the incentives around time off in lieu for working out of hours, rather than elevated pay. We are paid a base rate just for being on call, it's less than our normal rate and the same for anyone in the company who goes on-call. It's payment for making ourselves available, not for doing any work. If I'm up in the night, I'll want a lie in the next morning.

kelnos 3y ago
Glad you get paid a base rate! A company I worked at (informally, as there was no specific policy) gave people the day off if they got paged overnight and had to do work. That's certainly something. The problem with it being informal is that many employees didn't realize it'd be ok for them to take off the next day, so they didn't. And managers often wouldn't pro-actively offer it. But the question to me is: if I have to wake up at 2am and work for 4 hours, is that "equivalent" to having the next day off? Maybe? But also: maybe not.
anotherhue 3y ago
I find the 'in lieu' method breaks down when one day is not equivalent to another. A Sunday with family that I lose isn't something a Monday on my own can replace. Then again the employer could just let the employee decide which one they want.
- andrewaylett 3y ago
  That might be a problem in theory, but it's not been a problem in practice for me. I've been on an on-call rota with my current employer for seven years or so, and it's never happened that I've lost even a significant fraction of a weekend. Stuff tends to break while folk are working and making changes, and I've lost evenings to serious outages. Issues out of hours tend to be solved by a roll-back, or a mitigation (like draining a region) that lets us leave the fix until regular working hours. Probably the most severely interrupted non-working day was when I needed to take an hour between the main couse and pudding one Christmas day, when I was second line on-call and the person who was formally on-call (who doesn't celebrate) needed a second pair of eyes. While the most severely-interrupted working day was probably the one that included this outage: https://medium.com/@SkyscannerEng/how-a-couple-of-characters-brought-down-our-site-356ccaf1fbc3 https://medium.com/@SkyscannerEng/how-a-couple-of-characters.... I'm quite proud of the response to that, especially that we quite carefully and deliberately stopped after one region was back up, running in a degraded state overnight in order to make sure we didn't burn out our teams by trying to do too much out of hours.

kelnos 3y ago

Glad you get paid a base rate! A company I worked at (informally, as there was no specific policy) gave people the day off if they got paged overnight and had to do work. That's certainly something. The problem with it being informal is that many employees didn't realize it'd be ok for them to take off the next day, so they didn't. And managers often wouldn't pro-actively offer it. But the question to me is: if I have to wake up at 2am and work for 4 hours, is that "equivalent" to having the next day off? Maybe? But also: maybe not.

anotherhue 3y ago

I find the 'in lieu' method breaks down when one day is not equivalent to another. A Sunday with family that I lose isn't something a Monday on my own can replace. Then again the employer could just let the employee decide which one they want.

andrewaylett 3y ago
That might be a problem in theory, but it's not been a problem in practice for me. I've been on an on-call rota with my current employer for seven years or so, and it's never happened that I've lost even a significant fraction of a weekend. Stuff tends to break while folk are working and making changes, and I've lost evenings to serious outages. Issues out of hours tend to be solved by a roll-back, or a mitigation (like draining a region) that lets us leave the fix until regular working hours. Probably the most severely interrupted non-working day was when I needed to take an hour between the main couse and pudding one Christmas day, when I was second line on-call and the person who was formally on-call (who doesn't celebrate) needed a second pair of eyes. While the most severely-interrupted working day was probably the one that included this outage: https://medium.com/@SkyscannerEng/how-a-couple-of-characters-brought-down-our-site-356ccaf1fbc3 https://medium.com/@SkyscannerEng/how-a-couple-of-characters.... I'm quite proud of the response to that, especially that we quite carefully and deliberately stopped after one region was back up, running in a degraded state overnight in order to make sure we didn't burn out our teams by trying to do too much out of hours.