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Comment by hawkice | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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