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Google pays people, both in cash, and/or in compensatory time off. This is specifically called out in the SRE book [0].

They've noted that it's important to pay compensation, both to be fair to the employees, and as a closed-loop feedback mechanism to ensure the business prioritizes fixing pages. This concept of business feedback is also discussed in a chapter of the terrific Seeking SRE book, chapter "Against On-Call: A Polemic" [1].

> Compensation Adequate compensation needs to be considered for out-of-hours support. Different organizations handle on-call compensation in different ways;

> Google offers time-off-in-lieu or straight cash compensation, capped at some proportion of overall salary.

> The compensation cap represents, in practice, a limit on the amount of on-call work that will be taken on by any individual.

> This compensation structure ensures incentivization to be involved in on-call duties as required by the team, but also promotes a balanced on-call work distribution and limits potential drawbacks of excessive on-call work, such as burnout or inadequate time for project work.

[0] https://landing.google.com/sre/sre-book/chapters/being-on-ca... (search Compensation) [1] http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920063964.do

If the on call hours were part of your initial contract and renumeration then that's OK. Otherwise they're changing your terms of employment in their favour, taking more of your life than they're paying you for.

Tell me more about this “contract” you speak of. We must work in very different industries if you get anything remotely like what you describe.

If you're not getting a written contract you're not working in the industry, you're the victim of a fraud.

In the US we call employment contracts "employment agreements", and we don't tend to think of them as contracts, even though they're legally enforceable as contracts. One of the weird things about living here.

They are absolutely contracts and people who don't treat them as such are just asking for trouble. I don't care what an employer tries to call it. Anything that has legal language and they're expecting me to sign my name on it is a legal contract and I treat it as such.

Every such paper I have received has explicitly noted the following, paraphrased:

- This is not a contract; any contract with us must be signed by the CEO. (Paper is not signed by the CEO.)

- You are an "at will" employee. The employment relationship may be ended at any time, by any party, for any reason, or no reason at all. There are no notice requirements, and any and all obligations of one party to the other are severed at the moment of separation.

- We may change the terms and conditions of your employment at any time. If you don't like it, you are free to leave.

As employment "contracts" go, these were slightly less useful to me than a roll of toilet paper.

I guess that makes sense. I've worked for a lot of small companies, though, so most of these I've signed have also been signed by the CEO. I wouldn't be surprised if they tried to treat it like a contract if they wanted to use it against you in court, though.

> - You are an "at will" employee. The employment relationship may be ended at any time, by any party, for any reason, or no reason at all. There are no notice requirements, and any and all obligations of one party to the other are severed at the moment of separation.

When I made my comment, I was trying to get a handle on just why Americans don't think of these as contracts, and the quoted bit is why I think. An employment contract, to an American, means, for whatever reason, probably because that's how Europeans do it, that the company can't just fire you.

The fact that should the agreement ever turn up in court, it's contract law that will be used to adjudicate it, just doesn't register. Probably because lawsuits are so far away from the American consciousness, something only big companies with huge budgets do with each other. Or ambulance chasers or other such grifters.

About the only thing such papers are good for in court is as proof that an employer-employee relationship existed. You do what we say, and we give you money. It could be used if the employer did not pay you what you were owed for working, for instance, but there is not much else on the paper itself that is enforceable.

The only negotiable point is the rate of pay. The valuable consideration is money for labor. All other terms and conditions of employment are set by the employee manual, which is "do this, just like this, or we fire you".

As contracts go, they suck for the employee.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract#Formation

One that discusses the work you’ll be doing, your hours/schedule, and whether or not there is on call work? I’ve never seen anything like this.

Bizarre. As a Brit I've never not had one. And I know US companies are perfectly capable of doing them for international employees.

The culture shock I'm feeling at this discovery is worse than discovering the US doesn't have electric kettles, bans crossing the road, or still uses cheques in shops.

That is simply not true in the US.

By default, in all but one US State, employees can be fired with no notice for no reason (or for any reason other than a handful of specific exceptions like "because of your race"). The legal departments of most companies feel that having a clearly specified contract would weaken this right, so as a matter of policy they do not have contracts with the majority of employees (this includes most tech employees). They have employees sign separate contracts for things like "keeping all the company's secrets", "granting ownership of copyrights and patents" or "promising not to work for any competitor for some length of time", and these contracts are not tied to their salaries.

You are welcome to decide that you don't like this system, but you will find it difficult to find employment.

  they need to be cool with getting a call
  when they aren't on call

This is all a question of how often it happens.

If I'm getting an emergency call when I'm not on call twice a year, well, these things happen.

If I'm getting such a call 12 times a year, I gotta wonder if there's a problem with our testing practices, our prioritisation/tech debt, our L1 support, our high-level architecture, our infrastructure, the teams that interface with our system, our training practices or our hiring standards.

Some of those will be within my power to fix. Others, maybe I figure it's easier for me to move companies.

> I've been on call for 20+ years. I've never gotten paid extra for it. I just figure it's baked into the normal paycheck

So much for 40 hour work week. People would be spinning in their graves if they knew what had become of employer-employee relationship.

Even 40 sounds too high to be honest, I've only been in the industry 4 years but already refuse anything more than 30hrs.

always the on-call engineer, me (the team lead), and then my manager and then their manager.

The best scheme in my experience is to have a 24/7 fully staffed L1 working shifts for initial response triage then waking the appropriate L2 to deal with the actual problem if it isn’t covered in the runbook. No good waking the DBA if you can’t login to the database because a router has crashed and failed to failover. The next morning the L2 guy updates the runbook so if possible if the same thing recurs L1 can just handle it.

What really doesn’t work is having the on-call support also doing out-of-hours work such as maintenance or whatever. That’s a recipe for disaster. People willing to make the sacrifice of on-call are a precious commodity to be used wisely, or they’ll walk.

Paying only in the event of a callout doesn’t work either, that person has still had to decline other activities in order to make themselves available.

If you have 24/7 coverage using run books, perhaps a better system would be to take the money you're spending on the 5ish people you need to do 24/7 coverage, and instead pay two people twice as much to codify everything in the run book so that it happens automatically. Then have the alerts go straight to the L2.

The infra for that job had far too many moving parts to make that feasible unfortunately. Multiple fibre providers, satellites, microwave relays, etc etc. The L1 guys would be on the phone alot in the event of a serious incident. Even today there still needs to be humans in the loop, I don’t see that changing.

I've been part of a formal on-call rotation in Ops departments at 3 companies, and only one of them actually compensated us specifically for it, and that was back in the 90s.

I like the idea of compensating by the week; seems like compensating per incident gives a bit of a perverse incentive.