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Comment by bastardoperator | Hacker News Reader

CEO's are completely detached from reality. Glad we got rid of pagerduty by hiring a couple folks outside of the US. Now everyone gets to sleep.

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I have no words to express how much I hate US culture around on call duty. When I was on call in Europe, in 2 different countries, it was either:

* you're on call but you get paid extra hours for each hour on call. This was enforced by law. You're asking an employee to put in more than the legal 40-ish hours? You pay. Let me tell you that companies only used that when they really cared about being up 24/7.

* your work hours were aligned with on call duty. So yeah, for a week every other month or so you were working 8pm-4am or something like that. Probably awful when you have a family but at least you're not 24h on the clock.

US companies are so freaking entitled when it comes to demanding on call support from their employees.

I work for a European company and on-call is mandatory (part of your employment contract, and no additional compensation). However, the culture around it is completely different. You're expected to take the next day off if you get paged in the middle of the night (unless it's like a 5 min false alarm), you get to expense all meals while on-call, and your manager freely gives time off in lieu if you have a bad shift.

True, that's another version that I've heard of but havent experienced. Essentially additional time off for being on call.

When I was working on-call in a previous role my team was split between Poland and Australia (where I’m based) - we used to have to take 80%~ of the on-call roster because Polish labour laws don’t allow more than 13 hours of work a day and a minimum of 35 hours of continuous rest a week.

Jealous

I have this in the US but I feel very privileged

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