When you were doing on-call without being paid, that's called wage theft. It's the single biggest kind of theft in North America: https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-bigger-problem-fo...

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.

This "us vs them" concept is where I think we've lost the plot. Remember that we're the experts in complex systems that we've been selling to the business to add value and we've been happily taking their money for decades. When they ask "can the technology support this?" we, like an eager child showing off our new toy, assure them that it can and beg them to let us prove it.

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 don't know about you but I'm not 'selling' my work to the business like a black box, I am working under the direct supervision of the business and any and all work that I do is the result of a team effort and direction from management, non-engineering, and engineering staff. Let me emphasize: all the work that gets put into production is a team effort and a team responsibility.

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.

I mean this with all the respect in the world, but I think you've gotten yourself caught in an ideological bubble here. To someone who doesn't already agree with you, this comment sounds like an argument against the concept of wage theft more than an argument against oncall. After all, you can't prove something's bad just by classifying it under a nasty-sounding label!

To be fair, if they are so far off the end that they think "man, getting called up at 2am without being paid was great because I learned how to keep my cool during a crisis!" then they are probably a lost cause.

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.

I purposefully did not make an argument against on-call, although I might have easily done that and others have in this thread. All I said is that doing on-call without pay is wage theft. And this is not an ideological bubble thing, as anyone will quickly understand if they ask a plumber to do on-call for their house plumbing system without pay.

I think a another analogy is that you had a plumber do some work for you a day before a leak, and in the middle of the night the pipes start leaking and you need to call him out to prevent property damage. In that case I would absolutely not expect to have to pay extra because he warranties his own work.

A better analogy would be a plumber you pay a handsome annual salary to maintain and improve your pipes--to what degree should they owe some emergency time in return is the question in this thread.

Plumbers (or companies employing plumbers) warranty their work. Do employees warranty their work for employers? I have never heard of that arrangement in the US.

I haven’t heard of that here either. The closest I can think of are sanctions that can be levied on individual employees by professional standards organizations. I do know trades warranties aren’t provided by employees working in that trade to their employer, just to customer individuals or organizations.

>The money has no bearing on me having been exploited or not. I've done it because it's cool

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.).

There's nothing in the world you'd do for free for a while for the chance of doing it? And I'm the naive one? Is money all there is in life in this comment section?

Also: For some people these nights might have been the only times they connected to their team mates on a different level.

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.

>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.

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.