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A moderate on-call ritual is a necessary evil. I’ve worked at places that tried to get rid of it with all kinds of automation and playbooks, only to revert back

A moderate on-call ritual is a necessary evil. I’ve worked at places that tried to get rid of it with all kinds of automation and playbooks, only to revert back to PagerDuty a few months later. That said, my last workplace completely burned me out with a terrible on-call policy and an absurdly short recovery period. Not to mention, upper management tried to gaslight everyone into thinking on-call was just part of normal work and didn’t warrant additional compensation. I get why it’s necessary, but I’m lucky enough to be in a position where I can flat-out decline any job that mandates unpaid on-call.

lolinder 2y ago
> upper management tried to gaslight everyone into thinking on-call was just part of normal work and didn’t warrant additional compensation. If it's made explicitly clear in the job interview process that on call is expected in a role and if it's enforced evenly across the organization, this can absolutely be normal and ethical—you're on a specific salary and your salary includes on call expectations. If you knew about that going in then you weighed it against the offered salary and decided it was worth it. It's not "unpaid on-call" in that case, it's paid on-call. Obviously it can also be done poorly in ways that are harmful and dishonest. Not communicating it clearly during the job interview and salary negotiation, applying it inconsistently, or changing the frequency or the difficulty of the rotation after you have started are all real problems.
- rednafi 2y ago
  I agree with your expansion. In this particular case, the on-call policy was enforced after the hiring.
- AdieuToLogic 2y ago
  >> upper management tried to gaslight everyone into thinking on-call was just part of normal work and didn’t warrant additional compensation. > If it's made explicitly clear in the job interview process that on call is expected in a role and if it's enforced evenly across the organization, this can absolutely be normal and ethical—you're on a specific salary and your salary includes on call expectations. Where this logic breaks down is when on-call expectations are in addition to what a salaried position compensates - a 40-ish hour work week. Expecting an employee to be paid industry rate for services rendered and then expecting periodic 24-168 hour near real-time availability without compensation is, by definition, "unpaid on-call".
  - parpfish 2y ago
    And the frequency with which you have to take one of the 168-hour shifts is inversely proportional to how many colleagues you have in the rotation. if somebody leaves, the amount of unpaid work you have to do increases. So if on-call isn’t explicitly compensated, an employee quitting essentially gives the rest of the team more hours at a lower hourly rate.
- genocidicbunny 2y ago
  For me personally, there's no possible way that a company can correctly factor on-call costs into my salary, because the on-call costs are based on what I am doing at the time. You'd have to pay me a biblically large multiplier on my base salary to get me to pick work over my kids or wife. My kids aren't going to remember that I made a few thousand bucks by ducking out halfway through an important-to-them event. My wife is sure as shit ain't going to forgive me _or you_ if you call me into work in the middle of some adult time. And the cost for you to make sure that I'm not participating in such activities and am available to work on very short notice is...well, it's the exact same number as if you had interrupted such activities. If you really need the coverage in the middle of the night, hire more engineers whose normal 8-ish hour shifts are during the night? Can't afford to? Perhaps you're not so good at business then. Better yet, stop building a fucking house of cards that can topple your company if it wobbles a little bit. If your systems going down for a few hours can take down your company, outside of some exceptional circumstances, that's a failure on your part.
bigstrat2003 2y ago
> Not to mention, upper management tried to gaslight everyone into thinking on-call was just part of normal work and didn’t warrant additional compensation. Every position I've held (save my current one), that is most definitely the norm. If you have a busy night managers are cool with you coming in late the next day (or potentially not at all), but it's very unusual to be paid for on call in my experience.
- spike021 2y ago
  Fortunately every job I've held had the situation where the manager was fine with me/the team taking make-up time the following day if you were interrupted during offhours. Sure extra comp would be nice, but if on-call has to be done, this isn't the worst way.
tbrownaw 2y ago
> tried to gaslight everyone into thinking on-call was just part of normal work and didn’t warrant additional compensation. It is part of normal work for roles where it's a thing, and I'd think it could be either baked in or on top as long as which one it was was known at salary negotiation time.
fzeroracer 2y ago
I don't think on-call is a necessary evil; I think it's the result of managers and leaders not caring about having multiple failsafes instead opting to foist that problem onto engineers via unpaid labor. You can have a system with enough redundancy, ability to rollback and deployment scheduling where any sort of on-call incident is highly rare and low impact. But that requires spending time and money on solving those problems which is money that could be spent on developing more features faster. A buggy and broken product doesn't matter as long as you can shovel out More faster. I've been on both types of teams and I'm at the point in my career that if I'm going to be on-call I'm expecting to be compensated appropriately with actual on-call hours worked. And part of the problem is that even on a team where you're informed of on-call duties and rotation, if the team gets cut or people leave then you're on the hook for working longer hours for less pay. It's inherently exploitative.
- andrewaylett 2y ago
  We get time off in lieu for hours worked, and paid (at a fixed rate across the company) for hours where we need to be available to be paged. You don't want to only get paid if you're paged, especially if your services are normally quite reliable. Fail-safes are one thing, but they don't always kick in when we need them. My team is only paged one or two times a month, and when we are it's probably for something we've not seen before because whatever it was that broke last time has been fixed.
chgs 2y ago
My company has operated a 24/7 shift rota for 100 years. American “On call” is not normal. Some companies might have exceptional on call - the C suite will get called back from holidays or whatever should things really hit the fan. That’s once every few years.

lolinder 2y ago

> upper management tried to gaslight everyone into thinking on-call was just part of normal work and didn’t warrant additional compensation. If it's made explicitly clear in the job interview process that on call is expected in a role and if it's enforced evenly across the organization, this can absolutely be normal and ethical—you're on a specific salary and your salary includes on call expectations. If you knew about that going in then you weighed it against the offered salary and decided it was worth it. It's not "unpaid on-call" in that case, it's paid on-call. Obviously it can also be done poorly in ways that are harmful and dishonest. Not communicating it clearly during the job interview and salary negotiation, applying it inconsistently, or changing the frequency or the difficulty of the rotation after you have started are all real problems.

rednafi 2y ago
I agree with your expansion. In this particular case, the on-call policy was enforced after the hiring.
AdieuToLogic 2y ago
>> upper management tried to gaslight everyone into thinking on-call was just part of normal work and didn’t warrant additional compensation. > If it's made explicitly clear in the job interview process that on call is expected in a role and if it's enforced evenly across the organization, this can absolutely be normal and ethical—you're on a specific salary and your salary includes on call expectations. Where this logic breaks down is when on-call expectations are in addition to what a salaried position compensates - a 40-ish hour work week. Expecting an employee to be paid industry rate for services rendered and then expecting periodic 24-168 hour near real-time availability without compensation is, by definition, "unpaid on-call".
- parpfish 2y ago
  And the frequency with which you have to take one of the 168-hour shifts is inversely proportional to how many colleagues you have in the rotation. if somebody leaves, the amount of unpaid work you have to do increases. So if on-call isn’t explicitly compensated, an employee quitting essentially gives the rest of the team more hours at a lower hourly rate.
genocidicbunny 2y ago
For me personally, there's no possible way that a company can correctly factor on-call costs into my salary, because the on-call costs are based on what I am doing at the time. You'd have to pay me a biblically large multiplier on my base salary to get me to pick work over my kids or wife. My kids aren't going to remember that I made a few thousand bucks by ducking out halfway through an important-to-them event. My wife is sure as shit ain't going to forgive me _or you_ if you call me into work in the middle of some adult time. And the cost for you to make sure that I'm not participating in such activities and am available to work on very short notice is...well, it's the exact same number as if you had interrupted such activities. If you really need the coverage in the middle of the night, hire more engineers whose normal 8-ish hour shifts are during the night? Can't afford to? Perhaps you're not so good at business then. Better yet, stop building a fucking house of cards that can topple your company if it wobbles a little bit. If your systems going down for a few hours can take down your company, outside of some exceptional circumstances, that's a failure on your part.

bigstrat2003 2y ago

> Not to mention, upper management tried to gaslight everyone into thinking on-call was just part of normal work and didn’t warrant additional compensation. Every position I've held (save my current one), that is most definitely the norm. If you have a busy night managers are cool with you coming in late the next day (or potentially not at all), but it's very unusual to be paid for on call in my experience.

spike021 2y ago
Fortunately every job I've held had the situation where the manager was fine with me/the team taking make-up time the following day if you were interrupted during offhours. Sure extra comp would be nice, but if on-call has to be done, this isn't the worst way.

tbrownaw 2y ago

> tried to gaslight everyone into thinking on-call was just part of normal work and didn’t warrant additional compensation. It is part of normal work for roles where it's a thing, and I'd think it could be either baked in or on top as long as which one it was was known at salary negotiation time.

fzeroracer 2y ago

I don't think on-call is a necessary evil; I think it's the result of managers and leaders not caring about having multiple failsafes instead opting to foist that problem onto engineers via unpaid labor. You can have a system with enough redundancy, ability to rollback and deployment scheduling where any sort of on-call incident is highly rare and low impact. But that requires spending time and money on solving those problems which is money that could be spent on developing more features faster. A buggy and broken product doesn't matter as long as you can shovel out More faster. I've been on both types of teams and I'm at the point in my career that if I'm going to be on-call I'm expecting to be compensated appropriately with actual on-call hours worked. And part of the problem is that even on a team where you're informed of on-call duties and rotation, if the team gets cut or people leave then you're on the hook for working longer hours for less pay. It's inherently exploitative.

andrewaylett 2y ago
We get time off in lieu for hours worked, and paid (at a fixed rate across the company) for hours where we need to be available to be paged. You don't want to only get paid if you're paged, especially if your services are normally quite reliable. Fail-safes are one thing, but they don't always kick in when we need them. My team is only paged one or two times a month, and when we are it's probably for something we've not seen before because whatever it was that broke last time has been fixed.

chgs 2y ago

My company has operated a 24/7 shift rota for 100 years. American “On call” is not normal. Some companies might have exceptional on call - the C suite will get called back from holidays or whatever should things really hit the fan. That’s once every few years.