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Comment by mttyng | Hacker News Reader

> What's the on-call plan/schedule? (what's the pay for standby and call-out)

I’ve never been in a position where we were paid for on-call (i.e. fix prod at 2am) work. Is that not typical?

I've never been in a position where I've not been paid for each call out. (And only one place which didn't pay for standby)

Ditto. On-call work was just regular hours, and we could use those against our 40/week obligation aka cut out early, or else file for comp time.

We had a quarter of big router changes and I got enough comp time to take a decent vacation (padded by PTO days, mind you)

Some data center techs I knew would get time-and-a-half for any on-call work they had to do.

In the UK at a large company, I took TOIL for out of hours working at OT rates 1.25 up to 8pm 1.5 up to midnight and Saturday and I think it was 2x plus a day on Sunday.

Whoa.

That gives me pause. It makes absolute sense, but it never occurred to me.

When I have seen this done, the amount is often inconsequential in relation to the amount of effort to be on-call. I don't love this incentive structure because the cost of being on-call is somewhat fixed up front. Needing to avoid being out of page coverage / availability and having a computer available is a high cost paid by the employee regardless of actual page-out workload. Paying for standby certainly helps, but I haven't seen standby pay match well with the perceived effort. Maybe some companies do this right, but higher negotiated upfront pay has appeared more effective in my experience.

I'm lucky though. I see recurring conversations about it on /r/devops and I'm aware not everyone is in the same situation. Some even wear it as a badge of honour that they improve reliability so they shouldn't be paid for things breaking. (Which I completely disagree with) But working after hours is working after hours - if it doesn't feel right, maybe you should have a conversation about it.

Where devops works is that there's shared call-out responsibility when things go wrong at 2am. It won't happen again because they'll take the time to fix things.

If management don't also share in the responsibility, it -might- will happen again because they won't allocate the time (and-a-half) to fix things.

The only job where I had to be on-call, we got paid extra during the week we were scheduled, and got paid more extra for the hours we put in.

Are you in europe?

Google in the US does this. I was on call for my team about once a month and at the end of the year, the bonus for merely being available was quite large. (I think it was something like $1600 a week, but I could be misremembering.)

My understanding is at Google it's counted as 33.3% time for every hour you are on-call with a 30 minute response time.

And 66.6% time for every hour you are on-call with a 5 minute response time.

I believe that is for SRE teams. SRE teams are much more reasonable about on-call, having enough staff to have the on-call person on-call during their workday, not at 3am their time.

SWE teams often don't have the global coverage that entails, so they just pay you extra to be close to your phone.

Yes, Netherland. It's entirely possible it's required by law to pay people for the time they work, so that could explain the difference.

I'd expect at minimum time off in lieu, unless the equity is significant, and resistant to dilution.

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