“Phenomenal”? Hardly. The base expectation outside of tech is time-and-a-half for each hour over 8 in a day, or 40 in a week.
Every time I was oncall during weekends or holidays (or outside work hours) it was just a normal day with the occasional "phone call". As long as I had my laptop with me and I had some kind of network coverage (which I did unless I went trekking in the non-existing mountains of Ireland, which I didn't during oncall days) it was fine.
My coworkers in search or ads were a bit more stressed out on that though, I agree, having to ask their secondary to cover just for the 5-10 minutes they wanted to take a shower because they could not miss a single alert, but for us on a secondary service that was not a problem. I've had days where I commuted by train (40 minutes ride) with spotty internet and 0 problems because having a 15-30 minutes response time meant that I had enough buffer to get off the train and find some place with wifi with plenty of time to spare.
> I definitely consider every hour of the day I'm on call (all 24 of them) as a working hour
You'd be incorrect. We also don't do 24 hours shifts.
And not every tech company has Google's on-call policy. The company I work for has team-defined shifts, generally these are one or two week rotations where the person on call is on call 24/7 during their rotation.
Hiking? Nope. Driving through dead zones? Nope. Going to the movies? Not really. Bike riding? Maybe, if you can hear your phone, haul around a heavy laptop, and stick to areas with phone reception.
Being on call is work. Call it labor or don’t, I don’t care about the semantics. Work is work.
Or do you, maybe, get paid a general smoothened out curve based on the average for your work expectations over a certain period of time?
You get bonuses, raises, promotions based on how well you perform your job as your salary gets adjusted (ideally at least) according to that (+ end of year bonuses, stock/options, etc). This all also contributes to your total compensation including oncall (which is based on your normal work rates).
Usually how it worked in my team at least, if someone had a tougher-than-usual shift (lots of alerts, large scale incidents, etc) we'd get some extra "rest time" (unofficially) or we'd be told to just take some time off in lieu, etc (on top of your oncall pay already) at discretion of your manager. On the other hand if your team's oncall stats (pager alerts, SLOs metrics, etc) were bad over a long period of time with a lowering trend, you'd have to restructure the way you approach/monitor your system and deal with releases and change management practices because something clearly isn't working. This is all encoded in the principles[0] of what it means to be a good SRE and design good systems and is already taken in consideration as part of your stipend.
you know what this sounds like, a wonderful opportunity to exercise some privilege at the managers discretion.
Same as when I’m stuck on a bit of code and I’m looking through the window or taking a walk to think the problem through: I’m working and get paid for it.
Why should being on call and it’s mental + physical (being sober, within arm reach of your computer) burdens be any different?
Correct
> you’re working.
Incorrect
Regardless, people *are* getting paid for their oncall availability. Just not at a full rate (or 150% which would be even larger).
"being available" is not in any definition of labor I've ever read. Reading a piece of fiction on my couch is not labor under any reasonable definition, because I am not working.
Like if the trade off is Google's policy (2/3 time but freedom) or time and a half but you have to actually work the full weekend and you're expected to write code when not responding to incidents, which do you pick?
If you're a firefighter, is it labor to be at the station playing cards, just because there aren't any calls coming in right now? If you're an ER physician, is it not labor to be waiting for patients on a quiet night?
> Reading a piece of fiction on my couch is not labor under any reasonable definition, because I am not working.
If it's a Saturday and being on-call is preventing you from buying groceries or going to the movies, then being on your couch reading a piece of fiction is labor. If it's the Fourth of July and being on-call is preventing you from having a beer at the barbecue, then that's labor.
"Labor" isn't just the activities for which you are actively producing value for somebody else. Labor is any time your allowed options are restricted as a result of your employer's decisions. Sometimes, those restrictions dictate only a single option of being on-site working on a specific task. Sometimes, those restrictions allow multiple options have some flexibility to them, but the existence of those restrictions at all means that it is still labor being required of you.
Like I said, this is an abnormal definition of labor. It would mean, for example, that I am laboring 24/7, because there are some thing that my employment agreement does not allow me to ever do.
If you'd like to work under that definition of labor, that's fine, but then you cannot square it with an hourly-wage based definition of compensation for labor, so "time and a half for additional hour beyond 40" makes no sense in such a context.
I fully support people being compensated for such inconvenience. I don't think it makes sense to expect a greater-than-normal-work-time compensation for a lesser-than-normal-work-time inconvenience.
The relative difference may very well not exist between the two scenarios. If I can't just go to the beach with my wife, if I can't go walk the dog in the farther-away park, if I can't play an online game that lasts over 40 minutes per match, if I can't schedule a music lesson - then if the above is my definition of free time, then it's going to be difficult to convince me that there's a difference between "you can't do this because you're working" and "you can't do this because you're on-call". All it takes is that I take "can't do it" seriously enough.
If your typical day-off is filled with "short" activities, if you being on-call doesn't affect plans of other people close to you, if you plan your month so that you do all the housework & chores on your on-call days, then you'll probably be OK and will testify to the huge difference between the two.
The perception of this difference will thus vary from person to person, from circumstances to circumstances, from lifestyle to lifestyle.
But there *is* a difference, and that difference is exactly why you're paid 2/3 of your normal rate instead of 100% (or 150% as some people are saying). You aren't working, but you aren't entirely free either, so you are compensated for that by being paid something that is not quite your full rate. *OR* (at least by Google guidelines) you can accrue enough time to be able to fully take a day off later to make up for that time lost.
By the way depending on the day, requirements, oncall shift, style, etc you can definitely relax, play games, go to the beach, etc. Just because you are oncall it doesn't mean you can't categorically do any of those activities (unlike if you were *actually* working), it just means that you need to have a laptop nearby with internet access and temporarily drop whatever you are doing to be able to deal with an outage if it happens. For this reason, the company pays you, but it's not a full rate.
At some point I also romaticized the idea of being on the beach enjoying myself when the pager goes off. So I jump into a terminal, get the adrenaline rush, fix the problem, save the day, and carry on. That narrative just doesn't work for me anymore.
No, it requires that you be able to stop whatever it is you're doing and be working on a problem within some latency tolerance (5m and 20m are cited upthread, for example). For most modern datacenter workloads, that can be as simple as "carry your laptop and stay within reliable coverage". While sure, that rules out a lot of activites, most of our lives are spent in that regime already.
And be sober, and somewhere quiet enough you'll reliably hear/feel the notification, and be somewhere you can get that laptop out and type away at it for a while.
I get _much_ less enjoyment from many social activities when I'm on call. I enjoy gigs way less. I enjoy parties way less. I pretty much wont go to movies. I hate being "on call" while out at dinner with friends. I will not go on a date while on call (at least not with somebody I don't know well enough for them to understand the on call obligations).
> most of our lives are spent in that regime already
But not all hours in my life are of equal "value" to me. A lot of the "most valuable and enjoyable times" get disproportionally affected by being on call. I care way less about potentially being paged at 2:30am on a Tuesday morning than I do about having to curtail social events on a Friday evening or a weekend. You _will_ need to pay me handsomely to do that, and guarantee it only rarely becomes my responsibility. Been there, done that, am perfectly happy to turn down job offers that don't understand that (or to walk away from companies who try and spring that on me later I've accepted).
Technically this is not a requirement. I've definitely known people going oncall while tipsy or at the pub, as long as you're not shitfaced drunk and physically unable to answer the page. Not that it's something I'd ever do or recommend doing, but it's technically not forbidden.
There are plenty of things I do in my own time that can be interrupted: books, movies, HN, housework, etcetera.
Software developers aren't special, were not even operations staff. Just build stuff that fails gracefully and deal with it on Monday.
On-call #1. Averaged one page every week or two. Pages typically resulted from a failed automated process, which was scheduled to avoid running in the wee hours of the night. Most pages could be handled remotely, in about 10-15 minutes. For issues that required going in, even if the root cause couldn't be determined, the system could be brought to a safe state with further troubleshooting done the next day. If there was an overnight issue, you were not expected in until the afternoon, and supervisors would actively tell you to go home and sleep if you were there in the morning.
On-call #2. Averaged 3-5 pages per day. Pages occurred at random times during the day or night, with little to no predictability. All pages could be handled remotely, but typically took 1-3 hours to resolve. Issues frequently required creative problem solving, which was expected regardless of time of day. If there was an overnight issue, you were still expected to be on-site for the daily 7:30 AM meeting.
There was a drastic different in quality of life between the two on-calls. The first was as you say, an on call with the expectation that most of the time nothing will go wrong. The second would be more accurately described as a "working nights and weekends rotation", rather than an "on call rotation"
A 5 minute response time means to respond to the call out and start working on it. If you're on call, you should have a suitable WFH setup and it should be on standby, so 5 minutes is ample time. It doesn't means you have to have it resolved within 5 minutes of being called out, that would be absurd.
Empirically, it's more likely my internet connection gets overloaded and dies on a Friday night than I get paged.
That pretty much implies you cannot leave your home while on call.
I've never _quite_ had that demanding an on call requirement. For me the only "5 min response time" requirement has been to acknowledge the notification (mostly so it doesn't get sent to the escalation on call staff), and the requirement to be "on tools" has never been shorter than 30mins. That means I can at least head to a nearby cafe for breakfast, or go do some grocery shopping, or even head out for lunch somewhere nearby with friends. I meant I couldn't do things like go to movies or concerts or events more than 20-ish minutes from home (unless they were events I could reasonably take a laptop to and assume there'd be somewhere quiet for me to disappear to for as long as it took.)
This is why we have secondaries. If you need to leave your house and expect to not have internet access, you inform your secondary oncaller to cover for you for the time you're not available. You need to go to the store? You need to take a shower? You need to pick up your kid from school? You want to have a lunch break with friends? You want to go for a walk to mentally recover? You ping your secondary and ask them to cover you. That's literally what they are there for.
Secondaries are not your primaries. Secondaries are not supposed to be sitting there waiting for your call to cover them. That's not how escalation works.
Your secondary is someone who's not oncall but is available in case you need help or you become unable to acknowledge pages for a limited amount of time. You get into a car accident? You have a fever? You find yourself in a family emergency? Your secondary should be available to take over (it's not an escalation). I would regularly organize my commute time in the morning with my secondary because I'd have spotty internet (although later on we stopped doing that because my oncall response time was long enough for it to not be a problem), I'd tell them "hey I'll be unavailable between 9:30 and 10:00 am, can you cover me?" and they'd turn on their pager and take over the oncall duties while I commuted.
For people with stricter oncall response times (like google ads or google search SRE), you'd often communicate/coordinate with your secondary for everyday things like "going to the store" or "taking a shower". My friends in search-sre would just tell their secondary "Hey I'm planning to take a shower, can you cover me?" and they'd turn on their pager.
Maybe other companies do it differently, but that's how Google does it.
Most of us work at places that don a lot of things differently to Google I suspect.
There's a _huge_ difference between how on-call works in a dozen or so person startup, and hundred or two person single timezone business, and a thousands of engineers across almost all timezones.
I _dream_ of working at a place that has follow-the-sun teams of SDEs and SRDs across 3 or 4 timezones. I have not yet worked at a place large enough to have on call secondaries, I've only worked places where the only on call escalation is that the on call person's manager gets paged (and angry) if the on call person hasn't responded within the SLA. (And I've been both the on call person and the manager in that scenario in several different organisations...)
However, according to recent ECJ decisions[1][2][3], "Standby Duty" is not reserved exclusively for when the employee is required to remain on-premises, and it also depends on the degree to which the freedom of the employee is curtailed, specifically stating in one ruling[2]:
> ...
> 32 In the third place, and as regards more specifically periods of stand-by time, it is apparent from the case-law of the Court that a period during which no actual activity is carried out by the worker for the benefit of his or her employer does not necessarily constitute a ‘rest period’ for the application of Directive 2003/88.
> ...
> 36 Second, the Court has held that a period of stand-by time according to a stand-by system must also be classified, in its entirety, as ‘working time’ within the meaning of Directive 2003/88, even if a worker is not required to remain at his or her workplace, where, having regard to the impact, which is objective and very significant, that the constraints imposed on the worker have on the latter’s opportunities to pursue his or her personal and social interests, it differs from a period during which a worker is required simply to be at his or her employer’s disposal inasmuch as it must be possible for the employer to contact him or her (see, to that effect, judgment of 21 February 2018, Matzak, C‑518/15, EU:C:2018:82, paragraphs 63 to 66).
And while I'm very definitely not a lawyer, I think it's possible (likely, even) that having to be at a computer and working within 5 minutes of a page, even at 3AM, would constitute significant constraints on the worker and turn it from "On Call" to "Standby Duty", although the exact implications of that will vary from country to country.
All of that to say that I think that 5 minutes is absolutely bonkers as an expected response time. If I were subject to that, I wouldn't be able to leave my apartment for the duration I was on call - it takes me a lot more than 5 minutes to get to and from the supermarket or even the coffee place just outside. Even taking out the trash could take > 5 minutes (and with no cell reception, due to being underground).
[1] https://home.kpmg/xx/en/home/insights/2021/03/flash-alert-20...
[2] https://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf;jsession...
[3] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...
[4] (WARNING: auto-download PDF) https://ec.europa.eu/social/BlobServlet?docId=6474&langId=en
I’m not expected to “pull” responsibilities from a chat room; pages are pushed to me. If someone needs to get ahold of me they are supposed to page me, not message me.
Edit: that being said, oncall outside of business hours does limit my activities, such as hiking, biking, camping, traveling, and I would of course appreciate 100% time or time and a half.
If it is important for the application to be up 24/7, the company needs to pay for it at the usual rate!
I have many friends "in the trades." These are usually unionized, and the compensation can be jaw-dropping. Many of my friends deliberately try to get overtime, which can include "on-call."
But the work can be tough, and the salaries -although good- are usually less than most SWEs.
Useless expectation as it still steals your freedom.
With the pay structure described above I assume this is applied outside your normal working hours, where you're not doing anything other than being on call.
Someone has conned you into accepting less. I'm sorry.
I agree with you fully, on call time should be compensated at the usual rates, including overtime.
Why would I not charge less for this than real work? It involves much less actual work.
Why I believe it should be at the full-rate: because I don't trust the company culture to stay the same over my tenure there. My expectations for a "shit company" have to be the same as my expectations for a "good company", because a good one can turn to shit quickly.
> But why? Why do you think oncall should be paid the same as full work? Perhaps you have a different definition of oncall than me, where you expect to be paged once or twice a week, and spend maybe an hour or so fixing it each time?
When I'm oncall, I need to cancel all my social engagements for that week and delegate all my errands and such to my partner. Also not drink or take any mind altering substances. I must be 'ready' at any time of day or night. I (as well as others) sleep in the same bed with my partner. If my phone rings due to an alert, my partner is also woken up. So I need to sleep in the living room for a week. From the start, this affects my personal life to the extent that it would be unfair NOT to compensate me extra. It also affects my family way more than a regular desk job should.
You're mentioning the expectation to be paged once or twice a week. If those pages come at odd hours and you need to fix them on the spot, no exceptions, failure is not an option, etc.. it's still very disturbing to your personal life. Additionally, that's a parameter which is well outside of your control. I've seen oncall shifts which turned from '1-2 pages a week' to '5-10 pages a day' after the product finally got in the hands of regular users or after the team grows in size and code contributions grow suddenly. Or even better, when you're doing such a great job that your boss promotes you in the oncall tier and now you also get to do triage for alerts coming for the whole organization.
The volume of the alerts don't and shouldn't matter. If you're oncall, you're oncall, you have a responsibility to be available at all times, rain or snow, night or day. This deserves compensation. It's the same as with regular work. Do you get paid extra when you merge more PRs? Nope. You're paid relative to the value you add to the company. Even if you have weeks in which you barely do anything. You're paid for your 'availability' first, then your work.
Some companies (some I've been lucky to work at) implement some sort of follow-the-sun oncall shift and you at least get to have your sleep and generally minimal impact on your personal life. That is great and does not deserve extra compensation, because your work hours aren't altered at all.
I'm sad that labor in the US don't consider paying extra for oncall a norm. But it's not surprising, considering we did have dedicated engineers at one time who were paid to watch and maintain the health of the livesite 24/7. But then we figured we'd make regular engineers fuck their sleep cycles by adding oncall to the list of responsibilities, because it would be cheaper this way. And everybody agreed, because 'full-service ownership' and we're already paid way more than in other fields. When the latter changes (and it will), we'll still not get paid oncall and I'd love to see the discussion when that happens.
"failure is not an option" is not something I recognise, in the same way that sometimes features cannot be implemented as quickly as wanted, and systems are not as bugfree as I would like. But I am expected to put in a professional level of effort.
In my experience of oncall, it means carrying my laptop to social events, not drinking, and apologising if my alarm goes off in the night. For that, I accept the deal that is offered, which is less than my normal hourly rate, but still substantial given the number of hours.
If the volume of pages increased, or the required response time was lowered, I would reconsider.
> From the start, this affects my personal life to the extent that it would be unfair NOT to compensate me extra.
I don't think anyone is arguing that people oncall shouldn't be compensated extra. It's obvious that you should be compensated for being oncall, it would be criminal not to do so in my opinion.
The difference is that it's not full time employment compensation, because you're not working your normal work expectations.
No, you're right that it's not your normal work expectations.
It's working Overtime. Because it's availability ON TOP of your normal working expectations.
Overtime would be if you were actually sitting in front of your computer actively working on your project (coding, answering emails, bugs, feature requests, etc). Just being available counts as a remunerable activity but I don't think you'd be able to convince anyone that it counts as actual overtime duties like you would if you were actually overtime. It's "doing something" more than it is "doing nothing" but it's not as involved as actually "doing work" like you normally would. Hence, you are being paid for it, but it's not your full rate.
On-call outside of working hours is simply a second job, so the above argument still applies.
Except you did. There are pretty specific legal definitions of "on call", what it means and when you get paid for it in almost every jurisidiction. I've never seen one that pays you time and a half for being "on call". This is not the same if you get called and actually work overtime; that's regular rules. How a company entices (or doesn't) for taking a shift is up to them.
The Kool-Aid was really good though! XD
I feel like this is a very absolutist statement that does not look at the actual nuance of the situation. I could maybe agree that a 5min response time (like Google Search or Google Ads SREs go through) could be argued to be "work" (although I honestly don't think so), but I don't quite agree with the definition you are using to define "full employment/utilization".
Assuming I have to show up at the office every morning at 8am, this is basically saying that my employee is restricting my "movement and activities" outside work hours because if I can't get to the office in time by 8am then it means I am not free to do whatever I want off work. If I wanted to go to Hawaii the same morning as I'm expected to show up at work, and have no ability to get back to the office in time for my shift, does that mean that my employer is restricting my freedom of movement hence I should be compensated for it?
No, obviously not, that would be ridiculous.
Er, yes, that's exactly how it works? You can't take a vacation in the middle of the week and expect no reprimand. Thus the same should apply to oncall.
There is no point in a company paying someone 1x for 8 hours of work and another 3x for 16 hours of oncall when they can just hire 3 engineers and work 8 hour shifts. That way they only pay 3x (instead of 4x) AND have the engineers do engineering work 24 hours (instead of 8 hours + 16 hours of oncall).
Companies need to stop squeezing by on free or under-compensated labour from their workers and instead hire sufficient numbers of people to cover the work they want to be done.
What a shocking concept.
Unless you are working half the weekend, every weekend you are oncall, the tier-1 OCC policy wins over time-and-a-half for time worked.
Time and a half for hours worked is only > that 2/3 for time not worked if you're working 50% of the time, which you aren't, at least not regularly.
Unless you happen to be on call, of course. Are you going to advocate for not paying people who work in call centers for the time between phone calls? Being on call is working, even if you've just been told to hurry up and wait.
If you're going with the inconvenience definition of labor argument, the inconvenience of having to be somewhere specific is greater than...not.
What if the call comes right then? Now dinner is fucked. They'd better pay a lot to go messing with my outside life.
This is like the equivalent of saying dinner (or your day) is ruined if someone knocks on your front door unexpectedly. No it's not.
And yes, you're getting paid 2/3 of your (large) salary for the possibility of this inconvenience.
Shedding the analogy, the pager went off, the whatever is down, and now the company is losing $X million a second. People who's experience is with systems where X is a large number are going to have different opinions than that of those where X is way below 1 and it's fine to take a few minutes to finish deboning the chicken.
That's what the company decided was acceptable, you aren't required to go above and beyond that. You won't be rewarded for it. There's no need to be a hero.
If they actually want a 1- or 2- minute response, then sure in with you, you're functionally chained to your computer. But we're taking about situations where that isn't a requirement.
Butt also, systems that cause your employer to lose millions per second don't really exist, at least in the steady-state sense. The highest gross profit companies in the world are on the order of $1 million per minute, across all revenue streams.
The alternative is that your company expects you to actually work full time for the weekend, since that's what they're paying you for. Is that really what you want?
That's a strawman. Surely there are more alternatives, so I question whether or not you're acting in good faith. There's some dissonance here bc I see you getting viciously defensive (is that really what you want?) over something you're presumably happy about?
Like unless you believe that there is truly no difference in the imposition of "normal" work and oncall situations, and you believe that no one else who is rational can see a difference, it follows that oncall will be compensated less, because it is a lesser imposition to the people who choose to do it.
If you believe there are other rational alternatives, present them. Don't deal in innuendo and then claim I'm acting in bad faith. Nor am I being defensive, lol. I absolutely, in good faith, do not believe you fully understand the effects of what you and others in this thread are suggesting. And given that you weren't able to present any alternatives, I still really don't think you do.
And the whole take is stupidly privileged, to boot. "I'm only going to get so many risottos in my life". Getting paid $65 an hour to not cook risotto is not an imposition to most people, or even most software engineers.
There is a difference—the on call shift is more of an imposition. During regular hours, I could just decide to go for a walk for twenty minutes and nobody cares. I can't do that if I need to be able to have a few minute response time.
put a different way, no rational person would choose $100k + time and a half overtime over a flat $500k to do the same amount of work.
This seems extremely unlikely to ever be the actual two options someone might have.
More likely is something like 100k + time and a half OT versus 120k flat rate.
And rational people will take the flat rate, because the company will assure them "We don't ask for much Overtime"
And by the end of the year you've given them 100k worth of free labour.