Ask HN: Are you on-call after business hours? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Are you on-call after business hours?

2 pointscad13 comments

I'm a software engineer with 20 years experience, 8 years at my current employer. I am happy with my position and employer. That is until recently. I was notified I would have to start taking a week long 24/7 on-call rotation with 5 other team members. So, I am on-call 1 week out of 6 weeks. The alerts are generated from DataDog/New Relic monitors. I have never handled on-call after hours and I'm not excited to start at this point in my career with many family obligations and a desire for clear work/life boundaries. I was offered no additional compensation for the added responsibilities. I find being on-call invasive and disruptive, not only for me but also my family. When on-call, I sleep in a separate room from my wife so that her sleep is not disrupted. I also have a hard time falling asleep knowing that an alert could go off at any time.

I'm curious to hear how common this is in the industry. Are you on-call? Was it part of your initial hire responsibilities or added later? Did you receive any compensation for your duties? Am I going to be in the same situation if I change jobs/companies?

When I first started in the industry I was on call 24/7 (since being on-call is a P.I.T.A. that nobody wants - ergo 'give it to the new guy'). There was a very small stipend paid for being on duty with a reasonable rate if I received any calls out of hours that varied depending on if I could resolve it remotely / over the phone (aka - 'Have you tried rebooting it? If not, try it and call me back if that doesn't solve it') with time and a half (including travel time) for anything that needed a hands-on solution.

As I progressed up the ladder I became second level support (i.e. if the 'junior guy' couldn't fix it I would get a call from them to see if I had any magic wand solutions).

As I progressed further up the ladder I began carrying three phones (one work phone, one personal phone and one for high value clients).

To this day, I have kept that third phone number active and still accept calls on it even though I am semi-retired.

I agree that being on call is disruptive and I always had trouble sleeping just in case I missed a call. I also found that not being able to drink/'smoke' etc immensely disruptive.

Being on-call on a week long rotation as an engineer with 20 years experience (as in your case) I would be like 'ah hell no, stuff it up your jumper'. Being asked to do that for zero recompense would be a hard 'No' for me but I guess it depends on your own personal circumstances in terms of being able to walk if they (employer) insisted that I either suck it up or ship out.

I’m sorry I can’t offer you any more concrete advice except my own personal experiences but hopefully others here will chime in with some more helpful input.

Best of luck.

At a previous company (3 employers ago), we got like an extra $500/week for being on call. It was optional and about 7 or 8 people were in rotation. Some weeks, there would be no alerts. Other weeks, it'd be a total nightmare.

At another company, I was the only person on call for about 4 years, no additional compensation. I controlled all the alerting, so I'd just turn down the alerts to the bare minimum. Unless the site was completely down, I didn't get paged. Everything else waited until morning. It was a B2B SaaS business and very little actively happened outside of US working hours.

If you didn't do this for the first 20 years that's probably your answer. I'd expect people to refuse and/or quit in response to that, any of your colleagues gone yet? Usually a bit of a lag to get the alternative lined up.

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