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Comment by _l4lu | Hacker News Reader

This attitude is very common with software engineers and I find it baffling. Is it some kind of inferiority complex? I doubt Warren Buffett worries that he is overpaid and demands to be woken up in the middle of the night for some self-flagellation. So why do so many software engineers think "I am paid well so I deserve whatever the company throws at me"? You are selling something: your skills, expertise, and time on this planet. These things are limited and valuable. Negotiate the price and terms of the sale!

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I would say its a superiority complex : thinking software engineers are paid well and hence need to be ready to sacrifice more to maintain this superior position.

And of course also because the risks of bad or interrupted sleep is not recognised widely and mostly ignored.

Which is why you can also see the exec team paged in the middle of the night, right? Because they're paid well and need to sacrifice?

I’ve definitely seen my exec team get paged in the middle of the night, and they didn’t give any indication that it was unreasonable or uncommon. If anything they seemed to enjoy it, which to be honest I do as well. Being woken up to solve a problem (on rare occasion) can be validation that you’re an important person working on important things.

Yes, and had their vacations cut short and other such things than rank and file employees would tolerate far less.

Every oncall rotation I've been in for the past five years has had C-suite executives in it. Earlier the CTO, currently the CEO.

The executive team elects to do it, and they also get a fuckload of stock incentive to do it. Not the case for lower-rung engineers.

Lots of other fields have on calls or out of work expectations. That's part of the job, and you're compensated highly.

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.

>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.

I meant more collectively. But of course, yes, it's sweeping. It'll change regionally, or based on experience, or company culture, etc.

But I don't think it's unfair to say, especially in the US, that software engineers are highly compensated.

> Lots of other fields have on calls or out of work expectations.

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.

> Yes, and in many of them there are call-out fees and overtime.

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.

Because then the company has a financial incentive to reduce call-outs and overtime.

While I agree that in general they shouldn’t feel bad about asking to be being Paid More (tm) you are making unwarranted assumptions about how happy they are with their current employment situation. You don’t know them, don’t know how much they’re paid, and don’t know how well or badly they deal with being on call.

There is nothing immoral about deciding you’re happy.

>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.

No it is not. Because your signal is the truth for you.

Truth is not morality. "Truth for you" much less so.

All kinds of scumbags have their "personal truth" that justifies their actions too...

The truth is always moral

Under what moral framework?

Not moral, practical. The majority of places that do on-call do it because it's the default.

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).

If you believe that software engineers are not paid enough and it's morally important to do something about it then apparently I sent the best signal of all by retiring and thereby increasing demand for everyone else. But since this is absurd, I won't pat myself on the back too much.

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 never said it's wrong, I just said I don't understand it. I think my post sounds a lot less moralizing than the one I am replying to. On-call is not some kind of basic virtue. It is simply part of a job description, and that's a business contract.

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.

I'm honestly not sure how it's different from consultants who are only home on weekends after a week at a customer site in $RANDOM_CITY, engineers who have to basically live on a job site for weeks at a time, any number of professions that involve a lot of travel including weekend travel, or even the other salaried professions with on-call such as doctors.

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.

The CEOs of every Fortune 500 company (and many smaller ones too) are on-call 24/7.

1. They get paid 10's of millions of $'s a year.

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.

They definitely get involved when there's a meaningful impact on the company operations. Every business continuity plan involves top management; I've personally seen it in mid-size companies, and for the really big megacorps, just recently I was looking at a case study on the Maersk (#297 in fortune 500) management response to a cyberattack and it pretty much starts with the chairman being woken up at 4am local time. (e.g. source at https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/maersk-reinst... )

"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.

I also find it baffling that people still think about things the way you do.

It's not necessarily some kind of inferiority complex or anything else, it's about the free market.

"Free" market just means people bound by monetary considerations...

It means no one has to trade with you if they don't like what you have to offer in return. If you consider that "bound", then OK, but that language doesn't illuminate, it hides.

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.

The free market works the other way too though. If lab techs were in high demand (as they are), and your friend's employer was demanding an unreasonable schedule, she'd be free to jump ship to a better job. Right now software engineers have that kind of market power, so why not use it? If tomorrow the market decides we are overpaid, we'll either accept it or change jobs like your friend did. What I don't get is not using the power the free market gives you because?...

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