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Comment by ok_dad | Hacker News Reader

For a 5m on call time, I would literally have to be sitting at my computer with slack open reading hacker news. Yes, it’s basically the same thing.

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I'm currently on call.

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.

I understand that, my point is: you're still sitting at home when you could be out doing other things. It then should be paid as regular or OT hours, not 2/3 or 1/3 of regular pay or anything like that.

If your job is to sit at home for 95% of your working hours doing whatever you want, getting paid "regular or OT" developer salary, please let me know who your employer is. I'd like to bid on replacing you. I'll do that for 2/3 the price and I won't act entitled to it.

What if I was going to sit at home playing video games either way?

Can't join a raid on WoW without pissing off your guild mates halfway through.

Whether this is the case or not depends entirely on how likely a page is. There's always some potential event that could stop you from playing.

Empirically, it's more likely my internet connection gets overloaded and dies on a Friday night than I get paged.

Great, you’re not everyone. Don’t assume your life experience is effective else’s! That’s like the golden rule for life.

> 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,

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.)

> That pretty much implies you cannot leave your home while on call.

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.

No, not literally. Not everywhere.

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.

I don't know about your company but that's how it is at Google at least. It's not escalating, it's asking for coverage. It's different. Escalation happens if you miss your pages or if there's a larger outage happening (in which case IRM principles apply and more people are called in to contribute, including your secondary/tertiary/rest of the team/other oncall teams).

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.

> 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...)

In the EU Working Time Directive, it differentiates between the concept of "On Call Duty" and "Standby Duty," where the former is what this post is about, and the latter is generally reserved for when an employee is required to remain on the premises of their employer (e.g., being on-site overnight to immediately respond to emergencies). The primary difference is that On Call does not count as working time unless you get paged, whereas Standby Duty does count as working time, even if nothing happens. Within the EU, that means that Standby Duty counts against working hours allowed by the EU Working Time Directive and does not count as rest - e.g., the German Arbeitszeitgesetz limits workers to 10 hours per day (hard limit), and requires 11 hours between working periods (some exceptions that I don't believe are relevant here).

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 oncall today for a 5m response SLO service. I went out for lunch and went shopping. I carried my work phone and laptop around with me.

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.

It’s not 5 seconds! There are definitely a few activities I do at my home that I can’t drop in a few minutes notice (extended toilet break?) but I I can think of a ton of things I can do that would still let me be able to start working on my pc with a few minutes heads up.

I have a kid, so sometimes I can't drop what I'm doing. If I am required to be on-call at 5min response, that means I'm hiring a nanny/babysitter. That's what you all don't get here, people have complex lives outside of work and workplaces should not be shortchanging you or I in order to scrimp and save on customer support.

If it is important for the application to be up 24/7, the company needs to pay for it at the usual rate!

A typical on-call setup would be to have 'calls' sent to a mobile device, that can be acknowledged directly from the mobile. Sitting at a desktop computer with a browser open during an entire on-call period would be extremely unusual.

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