Hacker News Reader

Comment by api_or_ipa | Hacker News Reader

There are about 730 hours in a month. $14,000/month works out to ~$19.17 per hour. Of course, being on-call does not equate to being at work. This sounds like a ridiculous clerical error. Most of us here are used to being on-call for pagerduty, and aside from the occasional fire-alarm, none of us are significantly impacted, and certainly not compensated for these events.

View on HN

Ah I mean, that's just us on-call tech workers being taken advantage of. You should be being compensated for time that you spend being mostly responsible ie tethered to your laptop being sober because you can't responsible do anything else but wait for a page to come in. Google does this for their SREs (2/3rds base pay for all non-work hours spent on-call), it's embarrassing that most other companies don't, and that we put up with that.

> none of us are significantly impacted, and certainly not compensated for these events

Speak for yourself. If my job insists on forcing me to be (1) awake, (2) sober, and (3) within cell reception I most certainly expect to be paid for those hours, since clearly that is not MY time.

I was on call in the biomed field many many years ago, one week a month. I got a separate line item on my check for that. It wasn't much but I was compensated. Rarely got calls either, because I didn't support operating room equipment and there was a call centre (third-party) that followed a script (honed over time) to root out issues that weren't "emergencies".

Why we as a profession allow for "free labour" by being on call escapes me. No, the salary I got paid wasn't for being on call, it was for doing my normal 9 to 5 functions as a specialist.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com