My hours are 9-5, after that is entirely me time and if you expect me to br contact able and in s state of contribute you're going to be disappointed.
No amount of money is worth losing that me time.
which also means that this should be time that is paid on some hourly rate for the lower quality of live during the on-call time.
Also, there should be a rotation, with enough people to make this bearable.
There should be no rotation; there should be no on-call in the first place. If hiring staff to work normal hours is too expensive for the company, then the company has bigger problems than a service going down.
And having at least one daytime rotation agree that "well, you're expected to be on-call during business hours on Saturday" isn't nearly as crazy as "you can't relax at any time during the weekend".
There are plenty of people who would be happy with that and plenty more who would accept that arrangement if it came with extra compensation.
Instead, particularly at big companies, people get hired with some generic comp. package and then it's luck of the draw whether you have an on-call rotation or not, and if you do whether it's onerous or not.
You can plan around it, assuming a reasonable oncall schedule. If its every other week, yeah screw that. If its a week out of 4, you can plan it and still have it better than virtually every other highly paid profession there is, and many low pay ones.
> My hours are 9-5, after that is entirely me time
Then maybe an hourly job is better than a salaried one... Of course, if you're not paid the part, it's not worth it. But if you're paid 150, 200k or more? I hope you're not expecting 9-5.
Speak for yourself, but I would never accept a $150k a year gig that expected me to be on-call, say, 1 week out of every 6. $150k is absolutely a "9-5 and stop thinking about work when you get home" kind of salary, if we're talking California standards
Let's take this idea to it's logical extreme then. Surely you would agree that slavery is abusive. If we imagine a society where there are only slaves and slaveowners, your position would lead one to believe that slavery is not abusive, simply because it's the status quo.
This practice is abusive because it subverts the agreement that one will exchange their labor for pay within a defined set of hours (8 hours per day) and replaces it with the expectation (not agreement) that one will be "available" 24/7, but not actually "working" unless a pager goes off. This is plainly abusive, because it destroys your ability to use your free time to do things like drink alcohol, smoke marijuana, go hiking, go sailing, go for a run, etc. because you are required to be online with 15 minutes notice.
But for salaried employees, this isn't the agreement. I sometimes work four hour days. Sometimes I work odd hours. The agreement, for salaried employees, isnt about hours, it's about work getting done.
If someone consents to that, swell! I think many companies are abusive in that they don't compensate oncall work enough, but salaried oncall positions aren't inherently more abusive then having a lawyer on retainer.
My previous job I was on-call 1 week out of every 6. My first on-call week I got paged 100+ times (obv many of these alerts were firing within a minute of each other, but even accounting for that I was still being woken up multiple times per night). That week was particularly bad but I was still woken up an average of >= once per week on my on-call weeks. My team - the sole SRE team - was on-call for everything, including of course the 6 other dev teams' services.
Even worse, when I would fight to get bullshit alerts removed (the alerts that don't actually indicate a problem), I would get incredible pushback from, of all people, my own manager! (who was the manager of the SRE team since like I mentioned we were the only SRE team)
So not only were half the alerts bullshit, but I was counter incentivized to actually fix the problems causing the alerts. One great indicator of how bad things were was that everyone else on the SRE team (except the manager but he somehow always had unusually light on-call weeks) had a 5 minute delay set for pages, because the vast majority of pages would resolve within 1-3 minutes.
Oh, and by the way we weren't given any extra compensation whatsoever. Indeed I was told it was "part of the job description", which effectively meant that SRE skills were less valuable than the devs, because the devs were making identical salaries with no on-call requirement whatsoever! So a more specialized and, at least at this organization, difficult skillset, was worth less.
Anyway, I quit that job, and never looked back. I still have a friend on that exact team who is still putting up with being on-call, despite the incredible impact it has on his ability to go out and do stuff (mid 20's guy). I hear him complain about it all the time. But, like most people, he doesn't have the balls to either (a) push for internal change (which in fairness I tried and failed, although half the reason I failed was because nobody else on my team was willing to stick their neck out and push for the change with me), or (b) quit and find a new job.
So...yeah. Kind of rambling but we have a huge problem in our industry with people who either "don't have lives", or kind of do yet have so little self esteem or whatnot that they can't actually say no and protect their personal lives. In most cases on-call is simply a case of someone getting a raw deal and being too afraid to admit it to themselves.
Honestly, I'm not even sure how it's even remotely possible to draw a parallel between slavery and that. When negotiating a salary you'll have to take these things into account. Not worth it for the pay? Find another place to work. Jobs do grow on trees for people in our industry.
The question on whether it's abusive or not very obviously depends on the details. Yes, lol, I am actually willing to accept $250k per year, unlimited time off that I use upwards of 6 weeks per year of, full benefits, working from home, in the event my boss needs to call me once a year on a Saturday.
Sweeping generalizations are not helpful, and will likely hold you back in your career. You should evaluate things on their own merits.
If you’re making $200K/yr, maybe $150K of that is for your job and $50K is for being on-call. That seems like a more than fair price (or at least one that’s in the ballpark) for periodic on-call service.
In my own situation, I removed myself from on-call duties during a leave of absence, and never went back on after I returned to work. Since then, I've still gotten the same raises I got before.
Unless your stepping in to right the ship when a company is on fire operationally, and can point to specific action/results you delivered to right the ship - getting pages 8x per week does nothing for your career.
Salaries in the industry have a lot of expectations baked in, like the expectations of being able to learn and train yourself without the company having to pay for it (aside the occasional paid book). Being on call is another. That some folks can get the same pay regardless of their responsibilities or how hard their job actually is is, indeed, a problem.
No place I have ever worked has this kind of oncall policy.
Most I have seen have a response time of 1hr, note resolution, but response.
Amazon is large enough they should have people staffed 24/7 just by staggering the timezone codes at the different offices. This is how Cisco TAC works, you call them you get what ever timezone code is "day time" at that time.
So I would agree that 15min on call is abusive, luckily this is not my experience as "typical" in the industry, hell even fully staffed 24/7 call centers typically do not have a 15min response time
I have bootcamp students with 6 months of software development experience making more than top developers in France, lol. The few extra Euros you get for being on call hardly seems worth it.
There's a reason French workers are almost always rioting. Low pay and very few opportunities.
Nevertheless, I'm with the parent. This practice is abusive. When you're not working, you're not working. Being on call is working. If a company wants you to work longer hours they should make it explicit, pay for it, and comply with the local employment laws. This sort of argument that the business has no merit if they were to hire more people or pay can be applied to many exploitative situations. Most of the companies doing this are drowning in profits.
I would say the default assumption for most software engineers should be they are not on call and the company should try to structure itself around that assumption. The problem starts it's just considered the norm that software engineers are expected to work 24/7.
An average company with engineers who don't hate their job, staffed adequately, it should be a stars align kind of scenario where you can't get someone on a weekend. It's a simple matter of probability, and if that probability looks grim, either A. you're understaffed, or B, your staff is underengaged.
I have fixed customer outages on my phone out having a good time more than once. Usually with another engineer happy to help. Not just at one company. If you need an on call rotation, your culture sucks. I'm not advocating that people live to work, I'm advocating that people work at places where people enjoy working with their peers and their product enough that an occasional blip isn't a big deal. With the right infrastructure and the right people you should have this.
Congratulations, you've made you entire team on call year round.
I don't read work chats outside of core working hours if I'm not currently on-call. In general, most people shouldn't. Doing so is awful for your stress levels and work-life balance. I did it for more than a decade, burning out twice in the meantime, and things have been much better since I stopped.
The goal is not to need on call, because you BOTH have a stable system that requires rare off hours interventions, AND you have a team that owns that and is bothered rarely enough to not need to have a formal rotation.
On call systems with stable systems in my experience tend to be a real problem because people lose the on call urgency anyway.
TL;DR - the problem is your system, not being on call or not.
By working for free you’re subsidizing your organization’s unsustainable business model.
Don’t like it, quit and find a company that is moving slowly and doesn’t value ownership from engineers, someone else will fill in the vacant post. Sounds like a reasonably sustainable business model to me, especially since it has worked like this for over decades at some companies.
This has totally not been this way for decades.
Now if you're a founder, or you're being paid for this extra work or own a significant part of the business and benefit from it's success, that's a little bit different.
The lawyers at my company go home at 5 and make way more. I know a doctor who gets paid somewhere around $1500 for every day he is on call. And when they actually call him he makes even more.
Of course, you can still go to law school if you're really that jealous.
That said, there is a level of seniority at which "their problem" is "your problem." If you'd chuck the business out the door rather than getting paged a few times a year, you're not ready for that level yet. This varies by company and organization size, but fundamentally you can't (and shouldn't try to) anticipate everything up front. Sometimes you need the knowledge, judgement, or simply signing authority (literal or metaphorical) of someone specific.
I’ve long decided that unless I have the significant stock options to show for it it’s delusional. It’s what the company wants you to think: to have all the emotional investment and none of the actual ownership benefits.
If you want a cushy 9-5 job, go work for a code factory like HCL, TCS and whatnot. That way you can build crap and wash your hands after handling it to the customer.
In a startup environment, you gotta build your shit and maintain it to. It's an environment that's not for everyone.
I've been in oncall roosters several times in the past. And it made freaking sure we wrote the best software we could.
I also have been on the management side of it, and the way I set it up is that whoever was the oncall engineer, if he had to work for more than 2 hours after normal working hours, he would get an additional PTO day. It actually worked quite well.
Let it crash. If you can't afford to pay people enough that someone /wants/ to fix it at 2am, and you can't arrange a retainer for a contractor halfway around the world to be available if needed during their worktime, and you (owner/manager) don't want to do it yourself, then it can be off until someone starts at 9am next business day. (Most products and services aren't life critical).
Nobody on any of the threads is arguing that you should not be paid more for being on call.
The quality of life lost by being on call is not insignificant. This is why being on call should always be the absolute exception and not a reliable, planned in, tool at your companies disposal.
If you regularily fail to organize your core business around business hours, maybe you should get someone who is good at planing projects and communicating these plans and put them in charge? Or maybe just close your company and search for a different career path if you are unable to plan your projects?
Besides that, the rotation is known, and planned for, long in advance. So your "long-awaited weekend trip" shouldn't have been scheduled during your on-call shift in the first place.
However, there are certainly signals that a company respects a developers' time. Things like...was there effort put in the product around things that might minimize developer on-call time, like having more user self-serve options, or spending more time on testing, or having a proper feedback loop for recurring issues to be permanently squashes in a timely fashion, etc etc. Are managers regularly a part of these off-hour on-call issues so they're affected too, thus motivated to resolve it? Or does the company just abusively unload all of the burden on the developer and force them to use up their own personal time to maintain a product? Far too often it's the latter, and I think it should be clear to all that this is abusive practice and not "normal" or "standard" nor should any of us consider it that way.
You got it backwards: if you want a crappy quality of life (or have no life and you only identify with the company that sees you as a replaceable cog), and crappy products and customer service from a company that doesn't care (to plan right, to hire accordingly, to treat its staff right) go on call and overwork, producing sleep-derived crap.
Craftsmen and artisans take their time and have boundaries.
"Feature factories", startups, and mass market crap companies forego 9-to-5 and indoctrinate naive employees that they do something important by doing so.
>In a startup environment, you gotta build your shit and maintain it to. It's an environment that's not for everyone.
Yes. It's for starry-eyed naive youngsters right off the bus. The kind of people to believe they're "changing the world" by building a Facebook or Groupon.
they had a laser focus on just shipping and success theater, but little attention on actual utility of the end product. i was berated constantly for slowing things down or wanting to be more careful and do things that weren't necessarily easy but actually had potential to be useful. it's relieving to learn this is a common management deficiency.
Yeah but most of the people complaining only think they are Craftsmen but their day job is to write bad software to push ads
I've been an engineer on-call for 7 years since graduating. In the meantime I handled a handful of business critical situations, developed my ability to keep cool during crisis and put my skills to the test. When I started doing it, I wasn't even paid for on-call. Now I am. The money has no bearing on me having been exploited or not. I've done it because it's cool, and when I think it's too tiring I won't do it anymore.
Am I less of an engineer, not a true craftsman (wtv that means), because of this? There's other opinions in the world, no need to be so close minded.
It's also the kind of theft that insidiously convinces you that it's really cool and that you're actually OK with it because you're learning how to 'keep cool during crisis'. You know how else your employers could have taught you that? By providing actual training during working hours, while you were being paid.
We can't just chunk these complex systems over the wall and say "have fun with that" and demand more money when the solution breaks. This means we failed to properly estimate total cost of ownership when we sold them the system and now they're held hostage. This is borderline legal breach of contract.
If we told them the true sustainable cost of ownership for a follow the sun support model they likely would have never purchased the solution in the first place and we'd be out of a job.
We could have lots of annoying jobs or no jobs at all. I'll happily accept the former.
I'm not begging anyone to let me prove my technology, I'm working with management to come up with a solution that will work for the customer. Oftentimes management will forbid or otherwise prevent me from using a better, more robust technology that would have prevented more production issues because of short-sightedness. If I pointed this out and was still told to go ahead with the short-sighted solution, and it breaks in production, whose fault is that?
I'm not suggesting the 'it's your problem now, have fun' approach, I'm suggesting the 'pay overtime for overtime work' approach. This is nowhere even near to 'breach of contract', please don't throw around lawyer-like terms when you clearly don't understand what's being discussed.
It's fine to drink of the chalice of the corporate kool aid with moderation. Still, one should never get black out drunk out of it.
Convincing them of the "coolness" of it is the most common way to exploit the naive/fresh.
The same people who do so to others, wouldn't even piss if they weren't compensated for it...
(And being exploited or not is not a personal decision. If you aren't compensated for overtime, then you are exploited. It just means you're ok with it.).
I had that too, but it was for art projects, films, music, my own programming projects or some other thing that I certainly did not do for money.
The one thing that differs here is that the people I did this for/with would cross the country if I told them I am in need.
That's great, but you could still have done all those things if you were being compensated appropriately for the extra time you were putting in.
It's like unpaid internships. I'm sure unpaid interns often do learn useful skills and make useful connections. But the practice is still exploitative.
I do bring my computer with me when traveling out of state when on call but generally don’t worry about e.g. going for a few hours hike or whatever even if I won’t have the laptop with me. If it were stricter it would definitely be more annoying…
My team has an "oncall" shift like this where we assign a person to be responsible for triaging bugs and other non-urgent alerts just so we don't all stare at it and wait for somebody else (or inevitably me, the lead) to handle it but they are explicitly told that this responsibility does not extend beyond working hours.
Do you have to be always available or can you go somewhere without connection?
On the other hand if it’s that less crucial for your company, 2-3 times a year without much monetary impact to warrant dedicated staff, I’m sure it can wait until necessary working morning just fine.
It’s not whether I’m being utilised or not, it’s that I’m being required to project my availability!
Here's one. I get paged for urgent fixes maybe three times per year. To staff all three shifts with senior engineers to cover for that would be enough to make the company unprofitable and lose many jobs. I don't much like being woken in the middle of the night for such things, but it's clearly necessary and not abusive.