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> There were multiple weeks of uncompensated 24/7 on-call rotations throughout the year, many for stressful legacy applications the company refused to invest resources to actually maintain for real.

I am a 20-something who was woken up every day at 1am for weeks to "handle emergencies" that didn't exist -- are you telling me the standard is compensating people for this? I did get the sense that if it cost the company meaningful amounts of money they would have let me change the alerting system so that only real emergencies woke me up, instead of "not your department"ing me.

If you work as an engineer in the US you're probably an "exempt" employee by status, meaning that your employer doesn't have to compensate you for extra time. If you're sufficiently underpaid as an engineer that you're non-exempt, then you should be paid 1.5x for any time beyond 9-5/40 hours, or you should get to trade in those unscheduled hours to work less on following days.

EDIT: Realized I didn't address the question of whether it is "standard". I've heard that DevOps engineers have a bit of a compensation consideration (maybe $10-20k/year in the Bay Area where I live) for the on-call nature of their jobs, but I am sure that they are mostly paid enough to be exempt employees. This is totally anecdotal/second-hand and it would not surprise me if their pay is at parity or even worse than other software engineers.

Suffice it to say I was making $1X0k/year in a second tier American market (Chicago/Seattle/LA you know the deal), so I didn't feel underpaid per se -- more that, for those weeks when I was missing a lot of sleep, I got the sense it was a pretty raw deal.

It depends on the company and the system.

Unfortunately the rather depressing trend seems to be towards shoving it all on devs and not paying them more then justifying the reasoning as "if you are the one being paged then you are incentivized to fix things.

Unfortunately, and this is what you are seeing, too often they don't give you the resources to fix things and you just end up in ops hell.

They get away with this because we (devs) have allowed ourselves to get screwed over because we chug the koolaid. We don't get overtime because for some reason we're exempt, this lets companies get away (financially) with crunch time caused by incompetent management. Oncall rotations which don't pay extra are just another offshoot of this.

Many companies give an extra x00/week that you're on call. I won't say most, though.

I can't contain my ire at being woken up for phantom emergencies, though. That would be a cause for a new job, personally.

Additionally, any vanity perk that isn't in your contract is at the whim of the company. More than half the perks listed on the jobs page of the company I used to work at were completely untrue - some of them were out of date, and some were never offered to begin with.

I am still amazed that BaRT employees got away with striking. Many of them make $90k a year base!

Oh and this pathetic low-life still has a badge and a gun. https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/08/19/...

>I am also sick of hearing these 'rumors of one engineer at Google' making millions being cited as if it was a BLS salary report or something.

Yes. Also assuming that everyone who works in tech is a ".com millionaire", because either you worked at a startup and made millions in your stock options or you work at google and of course make at least $500k.

And having friends and family that know you are tech savvy so they always come to you with their tech woes.

"But you love doing it! You love this tech stuff!" Sorry. Not if I have a solution of the top of my head. 30$ of help please.

> got itself ranked as a "best place to work"

recently learned that a lot of places give employees incentives to leave positive reviews on glassdoor.. hopefully glassdoor doesn't go the same way as yelp

> There were multiple weeks of uncompensated 24/7 on-call rotations throughout the year

Call me crazy, but when I see there's an on call rotation, I figure that's part of the work I have to do as a salaried and not hourly employee, and I calculate the extra work into my total compensations vs. time worked estimate.

I totally agree with everything else you're saying, though.

> free dinner (no lunch interestingly)

Free lunch doesn't get them anything - you already expect to be at work before and after the lunch hour.

Free dinner gets you to stay until it arrives (6:30, I'd bet) and probably afterwards.

"And they get paid for overtime."

And put their life on the line, every call out. Never forget this.

Plenty of people get paid overtime without having to put their life on the line. Sadly, if you have a college degree and use it, the odds of getting OT are next to zero.

I come from a family of police officers, so I'm keenly aware of the risks police officers take, and I'm very appreciative of their service.

But.

I am tired of the automatic assumption that police officers and fire fighters are to be lionized because they "risk their lives". It's true that there are police officers and firefighters and EMTs who work tough beats and have extremely dangerous lives. But by and large, these jobs are significantly less dangerous than many other jobs that pay less and don't come with the public respect of being a firefighter/PO/etc.

In NYC, for example, sanitation workers have higher rates of injury and death than police officers do by 2x[1]. Convenience store clerks and commercial fishermen also have much higher death and injury rates.

None of that means that we shouldn't respect and appreciate those who work hard to keep us safe. But it's also reasonable to recognize that these positions pay well and have excellent benefits relative to jobs with much higher risk and much lower social respect.

1. http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/04/the-secr...

"I am tired of the automatic assumption that police officers and fire fighters are to be lionized because they "risk their lives"."

Just answering the original poster. Farming and construction are also dangerous and the risks, aside from random bad luck can be managed, while pay and conditions may vary. But that's not what was being discussed.

The OP was complaining about first responder over-time and pensions, while the most risk involved in well funded companies and startups is probably getting a paper cut. The distinction I draw is between the types of risk and reward being experienced.

Your point was about their risking their lives in exchange for overtime and pensions. My point is that there are many jobs that have more risk and no overtime or pensions and maybe those are the jobs we should be talking more about.