So many words and none of them include “pay people overtime for working on call”.
Forcing people to sit by their phones/computers 24/7 unpaid waiting for a system to maybe have a problem should be a practice explicitly barred by the FLSA.
Slightly off topic: stdout's On-Call.
If the SRE is unable to solve the issue and needs to page the escalation engineer they should get OT for that if it outside business hours. The whole "oh you got woken up at 3am just log in late" is BS because I still have the same amount of work to do.
I am constantly thinking about how abusive this practice is
On-call for many companies (most I've worked at in the past 23 years) is a borderline abusive practice; and often times they already run the team on fumes.
That's almost 6 weeks of pay in a single week. Yet we still had to pull teeth to get people to be on-call because of how much it sucks.
Overtime isn't necessary if expectations are set up front and the salary is boosted accordingly.
But yeah, it makes people feel better if you pay them less overall and then give them overtime when they're on-call. It's also better for the company because then the raises are smaller since they're based on the base salary and not the overtime.
Honestly I'd rather just get paid a higher salary with expected on-call hours up-front.
If you pay me N extra hours, where N is less than the hours I worked on call then you stole from me. Plain and simple. This should be pursued by rabid labor lawyers and interest at the prevailing 30 year rate should accrue on those dollars hourly until they are paid back.
The problem is, of course, the law dictating “exempt workers” was written in a time where the only people that would be exempt were executives with actual million dollars golden parachutes. Now, white collar labor is almost universally exempt allowing the state sanctioned theft of millions of dollars a year by corporations who lobby to keep the laws the same, and promoted by “grind culture” immoral bottom-barrel blood-suckers like PagerDuty.
It’s bullshit. You’re suffering from Stockholm syndrome. You’ve somehow managed to say stealing from you is okay because they put some nominal amount of unrelated dollars in front of you.
Someone who is on-call should be exempt from overtime if they're not paid hourly and it was clearly communicated up front. I think that's part that's missing. Most jobs don't make that clear up front.