That's a management issue of having no redundancy for someone performing something so crucial. If you're that crucial to operations, then you should be paid extremely lavishly, or be the owner, otherwise you're getting the short end of the stick.

Not really. If you formalise this kind of redundancy it leads to super annoying things like on-call rosters. Which are awful for a worker because it means you MUST be available immediately, can't drink or go out to the shop or whatever.

I much rather just have them call me for that one critical issue that happens in a very long time, and appreciating me putting in the time after hours, than being forced to sit at home waiting for something to break which never actually happens.

In practice there is always someone available who is able to make time for it so there is really no need for on-call rosters. As such the act of stepping up and helping out avoids having this heavy commitment.

You can be on-call and still do other things -- it's not all or nothing. My workplace has tiered SLOs for on-call, some being as relaxed as O(30 minutes) for first response.

Yeah you can do other things but you're never really 'free'. You always have to be able to drop what you're doing at a moments notice. I really hate that feeling.

I'd rather just be there when it's really needed.

How is that different from your current state, when you are checking your email, even on vacation?

> O(30 minutes)

So, O(1)?

I would demand to be paid if I was asked to be on call. On call to me means I’m working.

Yeah but I don't even want to have the pressure of being on call.

If you don't have on-call and you help out after hours everyone's appreciative. Might even get a small thank-you from the recognition portal for it, and "don't worry about that early meeting tomorrow, someone else will handle that". That kind of thing.

With on-call there's pressure all the time but it's not visible to anyone, and if you happen to be not immediately available everyone's angry. It's the total opposite in terms of experience.

So I try to be around when needed specifically to avoid having on-call commitments. As long as the occasional issue works out fine this way, nobody will bother setting up a formal on-call requirement. Most of my colleagues feel the same and it works out great. When shit hits the fan we're there anyway.

And the times I help out after hours... Plenty of times I'm not doing much during working hours, or have a personal things to do.. It's give and take. I love that flexibility.

I don’t even understand the label of on call. If you’re on call, you’re obligated to your employer. If you’re obligated to your employer, you should be getting paid.

If your employer wants to pay you for time that you spend at home doing non work stuff until they call, that’s up to them.

How is the pressure of “on call” any different than any other day at work? Unless you mean that your employer wants you to work 7 days a week, with 2 of them where you’re at home waiting to get a call. But then that issue is working 7 days a week.

This is not how it works in Europe. Usually you get some minimal stupid fee of say 50 euro per month for "being on call" (usually during one week per month or so) and you only get paid for the hours if something actually happens.

This is shit because the 50 bucks does not make up for the enormous loss of flexibility in your free time. Even if nothing happens your whole off-time for a week is restricted.

In Czech Republic and Slovakia it's at least 10% of your hourly salary. I've worked in a company where they payed 20% plus a fee of 50 euro or so to cover your connectivity cost. So a week of base Oncall was around 10% of your salary.

I have been on call for a few occasions years ago and it paid clearly more than 50 EUR for a single week.

I agree, that's a terrible deal.

Sometimes this type of redundancy would mean taking 2-3x the time to do some simple tasks.

The bus factor is often the last thing considered

This sounds like failures on multiple levels, you, you're organization, and leadership. So what do they do when you're incapacitated?

In a small company you often cannot have complete redundancy for everything. For any given area there will usually be someone who is better at it than everyone else there.

If I'm incapacitated someone else will do the things I need to do that cannot be put off until I'm available again, but for some of those things it will take them longer and they might not do as good a job as I would have.

It goes the other way, too. I've done things that other people are better at when they were on vacation or out sick.

This is one of the reasons that documenting procedures is so important. For those things I do that do not have redundancy, I've written checklists and guides that others can follow to do most of the things I normally do. They have done the same for their areas of non-redundancy.

Because of this, I can't think of any time in the last 15 years that someone had to be asked to work during their vacation. If something went wrong in their area, others were able to either fix it, or at least mitigate its effects sufficiently for the fix to wait for the person to get back.

But I'm still going to take a look at email every day or so while on vacation, just in case. My checklists and guides aren't perfect. I'm not in an adversarial relationship with my coworkers, so on those rare occasions when they need to consult my guides and checklists when I'm away and those don't fully cover it, and I can dash off a clarification or suggestion that will help them and also save me a lot of time when I get back, I'm going to do it.

This exactly! And knowing there is all this crap waiting when you get back is also not helping to relax.

I'd rather spend 10 minutes every day on my vacation making sure things are good and fixing small issues, it gives me a feeling nothing is getting out of control.

Besides, I like my job. It's not the saltmines.

> it gives me a feeling nothing is getting out of control.

I think many of us in technology feel the same, the trick is to repress the control freak inside you and enjoy your free time while someone whose job is to fix these problems works on them.

But fixing issues is something I enjoy :) And I can't hang out on the beach all day on my vacation, I get bored too quickly.

That's another thing entirely

But being bored is part of the free time

Boring is good, not bad

Edit: I love it too, but when I'm bored I work on some side project (never completed one!) instead

For me it's not. Being bored makes me restless, unfulfilled.

It gives me a feeling of fulfillment if I can do a bit of work for 10 minutes and help people out.

I understand it, but there are many ways to help.

In my case I've been diagnosed in the spectrum of autism, I know it's my problem if I get easily bored, not because I'm not checking my work email while I'm on holiday.

> I check email and sometimes answer when on vacation, because often 10 minutes spent addressing a small issue while I'm away prevents several days or a week or two of dealing with a huge issue when I get back.

The question is why ten minutes from home save days of work.

There's something horribly wrong going on if that's the case.

I'm on call a week every month, I get payed for it.

When I go back to work something happened that requires days or weeks of work to fix the issue, I will work to fix the issue for days or weeks, while still working no more than 40 hours/week.

Fixing management problems is above my pay grade.

In my case, it's not so much saving days or weeks of my time. Rather, it's being able to answer someone's quick question, direct them to someone, take a quick look at a doc and say it looks OK (or make a quick edit), etc. I don't feel it's something I have to do--and I'll only rarely do something that requires more effort--but it often seems like a pretty good cost/benefit tradeoff.