7 ms·

After some thankless years preventing outages for a big tech company, I will never take an oncall position again in my life. Most miserable working years I hav

After some thankless years preventing outages for a big tech company, I will never take an oncall position again in my life. Most miserable working years I have had. It's wild how normalized working on weekends and evenings becomes in teams with oncall. But it's not normal. Our users not being able to shitpost is simply not worth my weekend or evening. And outside of Google you don't even get paid for oncall at most big tech companies! Company losing millions of dollars an hour, but somehow not willing to pay me a dime to jump in at 3AM? Looks like it's not my problem!

scns 1y ago
> And outside of Google you don't even get paid for oncall at most big tech companies. What the redacted?
- redwall_hp 1y ago
  Welcome to the typical American salary abuse. There's even a specific legal cutout exempting information technology, scientific and artistic fields from the overtime pay requirements of the Fair Labor Standards Act. There's a similar cutout for management, which is how companies like GameStop squeeze their retail managers. They just don't give enough payroll hours for regular employees, so the salaried (but poorly paid) manager has to cover all of the gaps.
sneak 1y ago
> But this is not normal. Our users not being able to shitpost is simply not worth my weekend or evening. It is completely normal for staff to have to work 24/7 for critical services. Plumbing, HVAC, power plant engineers, doctors, nurses, hospital support staff, taxi drivers, system and network engineers - these people keep our modern world alive, all day, every day. Weekends, midnights, holidays, every hour of every day someone is AT WORK to make sure our society functions. Not only is it normal, it is essential and required. It’s ok that you don’t like having to work nights or weekends or holidays. But some people absolutely have to. Be thankful there are EMTs and surgeons and power and network engineers working instead of being with their families on holidays or in the wee hours of the night.
- xvector 1y ago
  No one dies if our users can't shitpost until tomorrow morning. I'm glad there are people willing to do oncall. Especially for critical services. But the software engineering profession as a whole would benefit from negotiating concessions for oncall. We have normalized work interfering with life so the company can squeeze a couple extra millions from ads. And for what? Nontrivial amount of ad revenue lost? Not my problem if the company can't pay me to mitigate.
  - disgruntledphd2 1y ago
    > Nontrivial amount of ad revenue lost? Not my problem if the company can't pay me to mitigate. Interestingly, when I worked on analytics around bugs we found that often (in the ads space), there actually wasn't an impact when advertisers were unable to create ads, as they just created all of them when the interface started working again. Now, if it had been the ad serving or pacing mechanisms then it would've been a lot of money, but not all outages are created equal.
  - sneak 1y ago
    Not all websites are for shitposting. I can’t talk to my clients for whom I am on call because Signal is down. I also can’t communicate with my immediate family. There are tons of systems positively critical to society downstream from these services. Some can tolerate downtime. Many can’t.
    - dist-epoch 1y ago
      You could give them a Phone call, you know. Pretty reliable technology.
      - sneak 1y ago
        No, actually, I can’t. My phone doesn’t have a phone number and can’t make calls.
      - sneak 1y ago
tilolebo 1y ago
"Your shitposting is very important to us, please stay on the site"
einarfd 1y ago
When I used to be on call for Cisco WebEx services. I got paid extra, and got extra time of. Even if nothing happened. In addition we where enough people on the rotation, so I didn't have to do it that often. I believe the rules varied based on jurisdiction, and I think some had worse deals, and some even better. But I was happy with our setup in Norway. Tbh I do not think we would have had, what we had if it wasn't for the local laws and regulations. Sometimes worker friendly laws can be nice.
- weakfish 1y ago
  As I was reading the parent, I was thinking “hm, doesn’t match my experience at Cisco!” So it’s funny to see your comment right after.
sksksk 1y ago
It's also unneccesary at large companies, since there'll likely be enough offices globally to have a follow the sun model.
- decimalenough 1y ago
  Follow the sun does not happen by itself. Very few if any engineering teams are equally split across thirds of the globe in such a way that (say) Asia can cover if both EMEA and the Americas are offline. Having two sites cover the pager is common, but even then you only have 16 working hours at best and somebody has to take the pager early/late.
  - macintux 1y ago
    Not to mention that the knowledge, skills, experience to troubleshoot/recover is rarely evenly distributed across the teams.
secondcoming 1y ago
We get TOIL for being on call.

scns 1y ago

> And outside of Google you don't even get paid for oncall at most big tech companies. What the redacted?

redwall_hp 1y ago
Welcome to the typical American salary abuse. There's even a specific legal cutout exempting information technology, scientific and artistic fields from the overtime pay requirements of the Fair Labor Standards Act. There's a similar cutout for management, which is how companies like GameStop squeeze their retail managers. They just don't give enough payroll hours for regular employees, so the salaried (but poorly paid) manager has to cover all of the gaps.

sneak 1y ago

> But this is not normal. Our users not being able to shitpost is simply not worth my weekend or evening. It is completely normal for staff to have to work 24/7 for critical services. Plumbing, HVAC, power plant engineers, doctors, nurses, hospital support staff, taxi drivers, system and network engineers - these people keep our modern world alive, all day, every day. Weekends, midnights, holidays, every hour of every day someone is AT WORK to make sure our society functions. Not only is it normal, it is essential and required. It’s ok that you don’t like having to work nights or weekends or holidays. But some people absolutely have to. Be thankful there are EMTs and surgeons and power and network engineers working instead of being with their families on holidays or in the wee hours of the night.

xvector 1y ago
No one dies if our users can't shitpost until tomorrow morning. I'm glad there are people willing to do oncall. Especially for critical services. But the software engineering profession as a whole would benefit from negotiating concessions for oncall. We have normalized work interfering with life so the company can squeeze a couple extra millions from ads. And for what? Nontrivial amount of ad revenue lost? Not my problem if the company can't pay me to mitigate.
- disgruntledphd2 1y ago
  > Nontrivial amount of ad revenue lost? Not my problem if the company can't pay me to mitigate. Interestingly, when I worked on analytics around bugs we found that often (in the ads space), there actually wasn't an impact when advertisers were unable to create ads, as they just created all of them when the interface started working again. Now, if it had been the ad serving or pacing mechanisms then it would've been a lot of money, but not all outages are created equal.
- sneak 1y ago
  Not all websites are for shitposting. I can’t talk to my clients for whom I am on call because Signal is down. I also can’t communicate with my immediate family. There are tons of systems positively critical to society downstream from these services. Some can tolerate downtime. Many can’t.
  - dist-epoch 1y ago
    You could give them a Phone call, you know. Pretty reliable technology.
    - sneak 1y ago
      No, actually, I can’t. My phone doesn’t have a phone number and can’t make calls.
    - sneak 1y ago

tilolebo 1y ago

"Your shitposting is very important to us, please stay on the site"

einarfd 1y ago

When I used to be on call for Cisco WebEx services. I got paid extra, and got extra time of. Even if nothing happened. In addition we where enough people on the rotation, so I didn't have to do it that often. I believe the rules varied based on jurisdiction, and I think some had worse deals, and some even better. But I was happy with our setup in Norway. Tbh I do not think we would have had, what we had if it wasn't for the local laws and regulations. Sometimes worker friendly laws can be nice.

weakfish 1y ago
As I was reading the parent, I was thinking “hm, doesn’t match my experience at Cisco!” So it’s funny to see your comment right after.

sksksk 1y ago

It's also unneccesary at large companies, since there'll likely be enough offices globally to have a follow the sun model.

decimalenough 1y ago
Follow the sun does not happen by itself. Very few if any engineering teams are equally split across thirds of the globe in such a way that (say) Asia can cover if both EMEA and the Americas are offline. Having two sites cover the pager is common, but even then you only have 16 working hours at best and somebody has to take the pager early/late.
- macintux 1y ago
  Not to mention that the knowledge, skills, experience to troubleshoot/recover is rarely evenly distributed across the teams.

secondcoming 1y ago

We get TOIL for being on call.