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Comment by giantg2 | Hacker News Reader

Ask about on-call expectations.

How often do you go on-call. Does everyone participate. How is the documentation handled for resolutions. How often are there problems that you would get called for.

These tell me a good deal about how management prioritizes things, if they value creating stable systems with good documentation, and if they treat everyone equally.

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Clarifying what the duties of an On-Call person are supposed to be would be helpful, too.

Our "on-call" engineer was originally only supposed to handle system-down emergencies, but more and more stuff has continued to pile onto their realm of responsibilities ("Oh, this thing is supposed to happen at 4 AM that no one wants to do? The on-call engineer can handle that!"), to the point that it now feels like an unpaid overtime shift.

Assuming you're from the US, how common is unpaid on-call there? Why would anyone even accept unpaid on-call?

Doing on-call is directly a no-go for me.

Unless a boat will sink, a plane will fall out of the sky, an unstable chemical will detonate or someone will die or lose a limb, there is nothing in the software world that necessitated me being on call. Oh the systems are down and we are loosing billions of dollars, ok share some of those billions and you will have people lined up to be on call. Tell me it's part of my regular salary and I am nope'ing on to the next opportunity. I am totally in agreement with you on this one. If I am attached to a phone that can disrupt my life at any moment I expect compensation for every hour I am attached to that phone, whether it rings or not, it is surprising how many companies think that is an outlandish expectation, but don't bat an eye at the fact that being on call literally robs a person of their free time and don't see that doing that without further compensation is not an outlandish request.

Other types of salaried jobs with on-call expectations actually pay overtime. It would be great if software did too.

100% agree with these comments. I will never do unpaid on-call, a gas engineer is paid for being on-call, software shouldn't be any different. Its most likely because their are many people in software who will work on call for free, I see it first hand at my current company.

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