I’m a software engineer. I’m paid well partly because things like oncall are necessary. It’s priced into the compensation.
> There is no situation where it’s ok to contact someone to do work outside of their work hours.
It sounds like you should find a company that agrees with this opinion. I don’t agree.
And of course also because the risks of bad or interrupted sleep is not recognised widely and mostly ignored.
There is nothing immoral about deciding you’re happy.
It is when it sends a signal (about the job, market, etc) that also affects others.
All kinds of scumbags have their "personal truth" that justifies their actions too...
That's the problem with on-call: it somehow took on moral undertones. And as a result it does not feel safe to speak out against it.
If on-call was widely seen as a negative (that a few people like because it gives them a sense of importance, more power to them) then there would be far fewer companies pushing for it as the default. As it stands, most people suffer silently for lack of an alternative. And the first step towards change is to make it OK to publicly say that on-call's a negative, a health hazard, and other options exist (though they may cost more).
More generally, free markets are doing absurd things all the time (see Matt Levine) which makes it hard to extend moral reasoning very far without getting the equivalent of divide-by-zero errors. So I don't think we should be all that concerned about how it affects the job market in general when negotiating with an employer. You know what you want better than you know what anyone else wants. Ask to be Paid More (tm) if that's what you want, but if you don't want to, you don't have to and people saying there is some kind of moral imperative to try to become even more wealthy at a faster rate can be ignored.
I personally think that a much healthier alternative would be to look for a position where one can maintain their physical and mental health, and give back extra income to worthy causes. There are many organizations much more worthy of my time and money than a bunch of managers who are too cheap to hire people for a follow-the-sun support org. But I'll accept a job with on-call if I think the rest of the deal outweighs the negatives.
It's still fair to call out on-call as a negative though. It's something to be aware of when accepting a job and for companies to keep in mind when recruiting.
If those all sound awful, by all means, do something else. But they're tradeoffs that people accept for their chosen job and compensation. My first job I would regularly be in shipyards and offshore for weeks at a time supervising some job. There was a modest allowance after some length of time but it paid better--and was almost certainly more interesting--than some routine office engineering job.
It's not necessarily some kind of inferiority complex or anything else, it's about the free market.
It is a painful slap in the face when the market doesn't price what you have to offer as high a you like. I know a friend who was convinced that her calling was to be an artist, but always had a hard time selling her works, and often complained about the unfairness of life. I guess she was "bound" by monetary considerations by not being able to make ends meet as an artist. Eventually she gave up and became a hospital lab tech and is well compensated. So the market was telling her that her skills as a hospital lab tech were much more valuable to society than her skills as an artist, even if her own preferences were otherwise.
At the same time, some other artist can buy an entire oceanside condo for one painting, because the market does value their output very highly.
That's all that we're talking about here. It is "free" but that doesn't mean that you'll be able to get whatever you want in exchange for your own output.
It's not like on call is a shock or something, it's not "whatever they throw at me", it's just... part of the job. My sister is a dentist, she has to be on call sometimes, it's not a shocker or something you don't know when you're signing up for the job.
You're implying that people aren't negotiating, but that's baseless. Software engineers are highly compensated because of these expectations, and we all negotiate accordingly.
This is quite a sweeping statement to make. My first engineering job salary was non-negotiable. I was told to either accept it, or they 'rapidly' move to another candidate.
But I don't think it's unfair to say, especially in the US, that software engineers are highly compensated.
Yes, and in many of them there are call-out fees and overtime. Programmers and sysadmins have convinced themselves that, as "professionals" they are not aligned with traditional working-class constructs like this.
Why is that any better than just getting paid overall more? Lots of companies also have internal policies like "if you get called in on a weekend take a long weekend next week" etc in my experience.
2. I doubt this is true. I've worked (and do work) for fortune 500 companies and have never ever heard of a CEO being paged for some sort of emergency. Presumably there can be some sort of crisis where they'll have to be involved within some reasonable time (extremely rare) but that's not exactly the same thing. That's why they have people working for them. That's not to say that some CEOs (especially for smaller companies) don't work very hard.
"presumably there can be some sort of crisis [...] but that's not exactly the same thing." - I'd say that it's exactly the same thing; on-call engineers are (or should be) just on an escalation path for crisis/emergency events; top managers are higher up in the escalation chain (if it's not a routine thing that others can easily resolve) but they're on escalation chain for every aspect of a large company. Of course, those events need to be rare - for example, as the original article states, up to 2-3 actual calls per year for a person being on-call; we should probably make a serious distinction between "on-call for emergencies" (which should be rare) and "routine out-of-hours support" (which might get triggered every week or even more frequently, obviously not an extraordinary event but a standard business process), which is something quite different and should have different solutions than emergency escalation.
Also, in my experience, the people who aren't getting woken up at 3am (aka. your boss) don't value the time and effort needed to stabilize these systems. So they want you working on the new shiny product feature that will get them promoted. Fixing the crappy data pipeline that shouldn't alert every other night isn't a priority when you aren't the one being woken up.
Well, it should be a priority, but I also don't work at that previous job for this exact reason. I took a nice pay increase and have never had to be on-call. Don't settle.
EDIT: Original 2000 hours comes from 40 hours a week * 50 weeks. Like I said, back of the napkin math here.
There's the rub. The issue isn't being on-call, it's not prioritizing making sure the system is robust so that on-call is boring.
In my last job there was no formal on-call, but if shit was going bad I'd be expected to resolve it, or track down the right resources to do so. In my current there is a formal on-call rotation. In my 15 years at the previous job I probably got called out of bed 3-4 times (and due to my roll I was the first call, if anyone got woken up, I did, and then had to wake anyone else needed). In my 7 months in the new job it hasn't happened yet.
When everything is on fire, it feels obvious to me that asking your $x00k employee to put it out isn't unreasonable. What is unreasonable is making that the plan instead of having robust fire-prevention systems and making that the exception.
Another way of thinking about this is that you've invested 10 dollars of your paycheck into your career. I worked way more than 50 hours a week when I started my career. Subsequently, I was able to drop out of school early (by 2 years, saving 10s of thousands of dollars), get a full time job, increase my compensation by 50% within 2 years, and then by 200% the following year when I changed companies.
By your math I'm sure I was getting paid 1/3rd of my actual compensation. But that has more than paid off in terms of the investment.
Two things.
1) I didn't just put in on-call overtime. I put in "free" hours in general.
2) I'm not really making a big assumption. Unsurprisingly working a lot of hours gave a very positive impression of me and I was able to easily justify raises and promotions when I asked.
Calling on-call hazing or bitch work is stupid, I'm not engaging with this.
Why would they pay for something they can get for free?
Or you priced yourself down.
I agree that on-call is necessary in certain professions (e.g, doctors). I also agree that if an employee is willing to do on-call and they are compensated accordingly, then the practice is still ethical.
However, to call someone to do work outside work hours is unreasonable. On-call is considered work time, so I am expecting to be contacted during that time. However, if I'm not on-call, then it is not time for me to work, and I shouldn't be contacted by my company and feel pressured to answer the call.
Likewise, lots of engineers in tech are compensated in equity so you have a stake in the business. in that case the lines on what constitutes personal time are less defined. I don’t see it as a bad thing if I’m on vacation and need to grab a laptop and help on an incident. I’ll take an extra day of vacation later or sleep in the next day. Life doesn’t have to be so inflexible.
They said on call is ethical if an employee is willing and compensated accordingly. Additional paid time off is compensation.
Okay, now imagine that I have a baby. I offer you a .0001% ownership in the baby, and you have to get (potentially, but often actually) woken up for 1 week out of every 6.
Does that sound like an arrangement that a rational, healthy, self actualized person would agree to? Of course not. You're getting all of the downside and none of the upside. In fact in many cases the "leadership" team themselves aren't even on call!
There is a world of difference between being called twice per year, and twice per week.
...and it's fine for that to be priced in as long as those expectations are as clear as the salary when I take the job.
I feel like young people are more exploitable and don't understand what they're sacrificing by being available all the time. I was the same way at the beginning of my career. Fortunately I had a good team, but there were definitely times where my sleep and health suffered from being on-call because I didn't know how to say no.
It might be priced into your compensation but that's the exception. If you are paid "market rate" and on call is "priced in" then you're underselling your services by a large margin.