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Comment by judge2020 | Hacker News Reader

judge2020·

> but used to pay people extra when they were the “get up and handle this” person.

When they were the person on-call, or only when they actually responded to an outage? Unless outages are really that infrequent, it pays to set clear boundaries on when and who is supposed to be available for an outage, and the cost of a dedicated solution like Pagerduty (or Grafana OnCall) is negligible.

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They were salaried engineers paid to carry, not for the calls. The people carrying were capable of initiating remedial action and of knowing which engineer to call if it really needed midnight engineering. We outsourced the simple triage by having pagers and the customer’s level 1 and level 2 teams had instructions for which pager to call.

It’s normal and expected to get paid to be on call even if you don’t have to get up. You have to schedule your life around the fact you might be interrupted. That’s worth money.

As said in the reply from 10 hours ago, these were alaried engineers "paid to carry", so you're right, but it's not hard to imagine a company having an on-call rotation for such pager without any extra pay.

> it's not hard to imagine a company having an on-call rotation for such pager without any extra pay.

I imagine it’s possible but that seems like a terrible idea. Making the compensation for being on-call obvious seems better for everyone involved. At least the one who might have to get up on Christmas know exactly what they are getting out of it and that no one is taking advantage of them in the rotation.

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