6 ms·

What they don't tell you about working for yourself is the fact you can be effectively on-call 24x7 every day. I am currently supporting four wineries that are

by boznz 2y ago

What they don't tell you about working for yourself is the fact you can be effectively on-call 24x7 every day. I am currently supporting four wineries that are processing thousands of tonnes of receivals 24x7. It happens for two months of the year and I am expected to be available from 06:00 to 22:00 during that time, there is no phoning in sick or having a lazy day, I work alone and only have one reputation. I don't want to be that contractor forever known for destroying a clients business. You can only do this for so long though, when two or three problems come in simultaneously it can cause issues as you drop something halfway through when something more important comes in. I once executed an SQL update query without a where clause under this kind of pressure, and ended up working until the next morning to recover, only to start again at 6AM. I have even had land-line calls at 2AM to bypass my mobile restrictions. The rewards are great, but don't let anyone tell you it is always easy. My current system is 16 years old now and I know all the ins and outs so it has been pretty easy to keep on top of things the last several years, however I am glad the replacement system is nearly written and it will be somebody else problem in 2026.

netruk44 2y ago
There's a big difference, though. In your case, you're the only employee of your business. And if you're not there the business will literally go under. And you also get directly rewarded for being there. I would guess that being 'on call' in this manner is possibly less draining on a person's soul (depending on how well they tolerate the risk of owning a business). Contrast that with being 'on call' for your megacorporation, who isn't giving you anything extra for your on call time because they 'already pay you enough'. And where the only negative consequence for the company if you fail to immediately respond within 15 minutes is that some executive in the company is kept waiting longer than 15 minutes, or some ads aren't being shown for 15 minutes. But if you aren't there, your boss is going to get a phone call and that's definitely not going to look good on you. And there's no bonus for fixing the problem, that was already your job in the first place. Sucks that you had to do it outside of scheduled hours, oh well. I'm with the author of this article. Take your on-call rotation and shove it (if you're a large corporation). I'm fortunate enough to be able to take a firm stance on this point, and do so happily.
- lolinder 2y ago
  > And you also get directly rewarded for being there. ... Contrast that with being 'on call' for your megacorporation, who isn't giving you anything extra for your on call time because they 'already pay you enough'. I'm really not seeing the distinction here. If a company offers a salary and includes on-call as part of the deal (and communicates that up front so it's not a bait and switch), how is that different than running your own business and getting compensated for your on-call time as part of a package that you sell to a client? In both cases you agree up front that you will be part of an on-call plan. In neither case are you getting a bonus for doing a good job at on-call, because either way you're just doing your job that you committed to ahead of time! I'm totally sympathetic to people who don't want to be part of an on-call. Jobs that have on-call aren't for you, that's fine. But I don't get this idea that it's uncompensated labor, unless there are tons of people out there who somehow ended up in jobs that sprung on-call on them without warning.
  - Macha 2y ago
    The big difference is as an owner you are fully in control of allocating your time, and so if out of hours workload is becoming too much, you can choose to not work on other things in favour of fixing that. In the corporate world, there's some manager who weighs up spending two weeks to properly fix an issue or automate a process vs just making their workers unhappy and doing something that will make the manager look good in the internal politics, and often will insist on the latter.
    - lolinder 2y ago
      But that's the problem with being in a bad company no matter what. If it weren't on call it would be something else that that manager would be making you suffer through. That doesn't mean on-call as a concept is terrible or that it's uncompensated labor, it just means that bad managers are capable of screwing up your life with any tools that you give them.
      - Macha 2y ago
Arainach 2y ago
Working for yourself is totally different. It's like demands from tech executives for long hours: "I worked long hours to make myself rich; why won't all of you work long hours to make me richer?"
- crossroadsguy 2y ago
  I somehow do not think OP is working for themselves. They are a contractor there. I do believe contracting is just being an employee on slightly different terms. > I work alone and only have one reputation. I don't want to be that contractor forever known for destroying a clients business.
  - seadan83 2y ago
    Hard to say, interesting observation: > I am currently supporting four wineries that are processing thousands of tonnes of receivals 24x7... I don't want to be that contractor forever known for destroying a clients business. If the 'clients' being referred to are the wineries, then it sounds like a self-run company. IE: the company is operating as a contractor to the winery clients, for whom (the wineries) a failure of the contractor (the company) would be a disaster for their business (the client, the wineries). OTOH if "clients" refers to the business (the company) that in turns does the support for the wineries, then yes - an individual contractor. The distinction would seem to me to really change the entire tenor of the comment. I'm curious which it is.
ipaddr 2y ago
Would it make sense to hire someone? When you run a solo person business getting over the mental hump about hiring someone is difficult. If rewards are great and things are stable (16 years is stable) what is preventing you from hiring someone to help with at least some aspect?
- boznz 2y ago
  I thought about hiring somebody five years ago, but the fact is my client has gone itself from a small/medium sized business to a corporate, from no IT staff to now thirty and they are working to replace the production systems I wrote the middle of this year. To be frank having that much responsibility as a one man business is quite scary. Also when I originally wrote the systems for them I had no clue it was going to get this busy and no clue I would be 24x7 support, also at 62 years old I really want to start winding down :-)
- saulpw 2y ago
  "The E-Myth Revisited" calls this working on your business as opposed to working in your business. Otherwise you don't own a business, you own a job.
shelled 2y ago
My friend worked for Amazon in India (software). He was often on 24x7 "on calls", which is touted as "good" here (because how else will you "learn"), during his 3rd or 4th week. By third night he was vomiting and had to visit the doctor. His manager called and had asked whether he had brought his laptop with him. His mother forced him to resign next day (he is from an extremely rich kind of family though). It is common here in most companies and among famous MNCs it is especially known in Amazon and Uber in India. What shocks more is these are the companies that can "follow the sun" w/o breaking a drop of fucking sweat! I have lost too many interviews just because I clearly asked for this, I always do, and I am doing it even now while I have been without a job after taking a year gap (which makes getting calls already difficult esp. with this AI and vibe onslaught). I am not giving up on this. I personally have never agreed to this which has caused lots of confrontations and stress(!!); a major source of my burnout WITHOUT ever doing the 24x7 on-call - so by just fighting it and keeping it away from me alone I was burnt out to the bits. It took me finally seeking medical advice to realise I was burnt out. I hope this is not sounding like dramatic but even now when I have been resting, travelling for a year the mere mention of words like Splunk, VictorOps (same as Splunk iirc), PagerDuty give me minor trigger attack kinda sensation - make me very agitated. But this is so common here. So common that it is considered one of the realities, truths. Yet, I have never understood, how, how can one agree to this? How? Is it some kind of social (if not racial) slave mentality? Is it some kind of grand coercion that they have no escape from? Or maybe it's just generation after generation subjecting the next generation to what they were subjected to while the stakeholders in the richer countries (because that is the structure) demand of this implicitly as they are stopped by health and safety laws from subjecting their underlings in their own developed home nations maybe.

by boznz 2y ago

netruk44 2y ago

There's a big difference, though. In your case, you're the only employee of your business. And if you're not there the business will literally go under. And you also get directly rewarded for being there. I would guess that being 'on call' in this manner is possibly less draining on a person's soul (depending on how well they tolerate the risk of owning a business). Contrast that with being 'on call' for your megacorporation, who isn't giving you anything extra for your on call time because they 'already pay you enough'. And where the only negative consequence for the company if you fail to immediately respond within 15 minutes is that some executive in the company is kept waiting longer than 15 minutes, or some ads aren't being shown for 15 minutes. But if you aren't there, your boss is going to get a phone call and that's definitely not going to look good on you. And there's no bonus for fixing the problem, that was already your job in the first place. Sucks that you had to do it outside of scheduled hours, oh well. I'm with the author of this article. Take your on-call rotation and shove it (if you're a large corporation). I'm fortunate enough to be able to take a firm stance on this point, and do so happily.

lolinder 2y ago
> And you also get directly rewarded for being there. ... Contrast that with being 'on call' for your megacorporation, who isn't giving you anything extra for your on call time because they 'already pay you enough'. I'm really not seeing the distinction here. If a company offers a salary and includes on-call as part of the deal (and communicates that up front so it's not a bait and switch), how is that different than running your own business and getting compensated for your on-call time as part of a package that you sell to a client? In both cases you agree up front that you will be part of an on-call plan. In neither case are you getting a bonus for doing a good job at on-call, because either way you're just doing your job that you committed to ahead of time! I'm totally sympathetic to people who don't want to be part of an on-call. Jobs that have on-call aren't for you, that's fine. But I don't get this idea that it's uncompensated labor, unless there are tons of people out there who somehow ended up in jobs that sprung on-call on them without warning.
- Macha 2y ago
  The big difference is as an owner you are fully in control of allocating your time, and so if out of hours workload is becoming too much, you can choose to not work on other things in favour of fixing that. In the corporate world, there's some manager who weighs up spending two weeks to properly fix an issue or automate a process vs just making their workers unhappy and doing something that will make the manager look good in the internal politics, and often will insist on the latter.
  - lolinder 2y ago
    But that's the problem with being in a bad company no matter what. If it weren't on call it would be something else that that manager would be making you suffer through. That doesn't mean on-call as a concept is terrible or that it's uncompensated labor, it just means that bad managers are capable of screwing up your life with any tools that you give them.
    - Macha 2y ago

Arainach 2y ago

Working for yourself is totally different. It's like demands from tech executives for long hours: "I worked long hours to make myself rich; why won't all of you work long hours to make me richer?"

crossroadsguy 2y ago
I somehow do not think OP is working for themselves. They are a contractor there. I do believe contracting is just being an employee on slightly different terms. > I work alone and only have one reputation. I don't want to be that contractor forever known for destroying a clients business.
- seadan83 2y ago
  Hard to say, interesting observation: > I am currently supporting four wineries that are processing thousands of tonnes of receivals 24x7... I don't want to be that contractor forever known for destroying a clients business. If the 'clients' being referred to are the wineries, then it sounds like a self-run company. IE: the company is operating as a contractor to the winery clients, for whom (the wineries) a failure of the contractor (the company) would be a disaster for their business (the client, the wineries). OTOH if "clients" refers to the business (the company) that in turns does the support for the wineries, then yes - an individual contractor. The distinction would seem to me to really change the entire tenor of the comment. I'm curious which it is.

ipaddr 2y ago

Would it make sense to hire someone? When you run a solo person business getting over the mental hump about hiring someone is difficult. If rewards are great and things are stable (16 years is stable) what is preventing you from hiring someone to help with at least some aspect?

boznz 2y ago
I thought about hiring somebody five years ago, but the fact is my client has gone itself from a small/medium sized business to a corporate, from no IT staff to now thirty and they are working to replace the production systems I wrote the middle of this year. To be frank having that much responsibility as a one man business is quite scary. Also when I originally wrote the systems for them I had no clue it was going to get this busy and no clue I would be 24x7 support, also at 62 years old I really want to start winding down :-)
saulpw 2y ago
"The E-Myth Revisited" calls this working on your business as opposed to working in your business. Otherwise you don't own a business, you own a job.

shelled 2y ago

My friend worked for Amazon in India (software). He was often on 24x7 "on calls", which is touted as "good" here (because how else will you "learn"), during his 3rd or 4th week. By third night he was vomiting and had to visit the doctor. His manager called and had asked whether he had brought his laptop with him. His mother forced him to resign next day (he is from an extremely rich kind of family though). It is common here in most companies and among famous MNCs it is especially known in Amazon and Uber in India. What shocks more is these are the companies that can "follow the sun" w/o breaking a drop of fucking sweat! I have lost too many interviews just because I clearly asked for this, I always do, and I am doing it even now while I have been without a job after taking a year gap (which makes getting calls already difficult esp. with this AI and vibe onslaught). I am not giving up on this. I personally have never agreed to this which has caused lots of confrontations and stress(!!); a major source of my burnout WITHOUT ever doing the 24x7 on-call - so by just fighting it and keeping it away from me alone I was burnt out to the bits. It took me finally seeking medical advice to realise I was burnt out. I hope this is not sounding like dramatic but even now when I have been resting, travelling for a year the mere mention of words like Splunk, VictorOps (same as Splunk iirc), PagerDuty give me minor trigger attack kinda sensation - make me very agitated. But this is so common here. So common that it is considered one of the realities, truths. Yet, I have never understood, how, how can one agree to this? How? Is it some kind of social (if not racial) slave mentality? Is it some kind of grand coercion that they have no escape from? Or maybe it's just generation after generation subjecting the next generation to what they were subjected to while the stakeholders in the richer countries (because that is the structure) demand of this implicitly as they are stopped by health and safety laws from subjecting their underlings in their own developed home nations maybe.