While I agree with your sentiment, I don't think 1.5x for 48 hours for being on call over a weekend is a sensible or reasonable ask.
Personally I'd be happy to manage/curtail the occasional weekend's social activity for 2 days pay (or time in lieu), at least as long as it's not as frequent as every month. While almost 2 weeks pay for being on call (and potentially never actually paged) would be nice, it's a kind of insane ask that just sends the wrong message in my opinion. If you don't want to do on call, just say so. Don't risk being mis interpreted as being a money-grubbing mercenary by pretending you'd be happy to do it for a high enough price that it would be totally impractical for most businesses to pay.
(If you came to me with the demand for 72 hours pay for being on call over a weekend, I'd advertise your position with a "regular 1 web in 6 on call" in the job description explaining you get 2 days pay for being on call for a weekend, then PIP you out for being a jerk as soon as I could. You're looking a lot like either a money-grubbing mercenary, or a spectacularly bad communicator.)
I don't think me being asked to work weekends is a very reasonable ask either so here we are. Pay me or find someone else. Pretty basic.
> Personally I'd be happy to ...
Personally I won't. That's my point..
> Don't risk being mis interpreted as being a money-grubbing mercenary by pretending you'd be happy to do it for a high enough price
That is exactly the situation though? I'm not working for you for feels. If you pay me enough I will work weekends on top of my normal 40, but it will cost you.
"Fuck you pay me." Comes to mind.
> then PIP you out for being a jerk
Mate, if you were to suddenly ask me to work weekends without pay you wouldn't need to pip me I'd already be interviewing.
In a weird piece of internet serendipity, Mike is an old old friend…
Yes, we should all be working for free for the sheer pleasure of changing the world, making VCs and company owners richer, and for the privilege of working under you.
Come on, expecting to be paid for work shouldn’t be a fireable offense or a signal for you to look for a new chump that will accept a worse deal.
My point is that asking for 72 hours compensation for being on call over a weekend is unreasonable, and I will consider you unreasonable for asking that.
Saying "No, I was never asked and never agreed to doing on call when I started, and I'm not going to agree to it now." is way way less unreasonable, in fact it's a perfectly reasonable response.
Negotiating "more than free but less that 72 hours" is also perfectly reasonable, I'm not looking for "chumps" to do it for free.
But if you tell me "2 weeks pay for a weekend of on call or GTFO!" I'm going to encourage you to keep your end of that ultimatum.Being _that_ unreasonable is the thing that's very very close to "a fireable offence" in my opinion.
Quite where that line is drawn between "zero" and "72 hours" is certainly arguable, but I'd suggest its somewhat closer to zero than 72. Like I said, personally I've done it for 16 hours or 24 hours, and been happy enough with both. YMMV. I guess it also depends on your experience with how often your on call alerts go off, and how much time is typically spent actually doing anything while on call. For me, the worst I've ever had is for me to get paged once or twice on maybe 30% of my on call weekends, and typically spend less than 10 or 20 mins on the vast majority of those pages, with only very rare times when actual serious time is required, like maybe once or twice a year tops.
To me, the latter response is perfectly reasonable. There are plenty of tasks that I wouldn't want to do as part of my regular work duties, that I would be happy to do in exchange for the right bonus check.
If a manager is looking for someone to perform the task, and they decided to _fire_ an employee because they said "I'd do it for $X" instead of saying "No I won't do it", I'd say that manager was either on a delusional ego trip or looking for another chump to exploit.
Nobody is saying oncall should be unpaid, especially not in this subthread you're commenting on. Did you lose the thread of the conversation?
I will probably never cease to be amazed at how naive software engineers can be. It's like the relatively high base salaries act as bedazzling enchantments that turn off parts of the rational brain.
And that is absolutely true.
More than happy for the market to eat my lunch. I'll eat mine, uninterrupted.