How can I get my engineers to accept being on call?

I've done a fair bit of on-call during my career, but I wouldn't do it anymore (at least not for any dollar amount a company would likely pay). I value my time outside work -- and my sleep -- too much.

The standard in SV seems to be that on-call is required and uncompensated (some companies will dishonestly try to suggest that your salary is higher than it would be otherwise). This is gross, and we shouldn't stand for it. There are exceptions of course, but even companies I've heard of that compensate for on-call seem to fall far short of what should be expected and required.

On-call should be compensated at a base per-hour rate (outside of 9am-5pm), with an elevated rate for time spent handling an incident if the pager does go off, with a minimum payout of 1 hour of time. It should be opt-in. If not enough people want to do it to get you the coverage you want, raise the rates until your employees feel that the time is worth the money.

It's pretty messed up that OP here is throwing shade at an employee who is balking at this, wanting to put them on a PIP, plus a thinly-veiled suggestion that they're lying about having asked about on-call requirements during their interview process. Bottom line is that they're drastically changing the terms of employment without offering extra compensation, and while in many jurisdictions that's legal, it's nonetheless unethical and disgusting.

The whole, "How can I get people to do X when they don't want to do it for $Y?" is just a funny question. It is like asking, "How do I buy a sandwich when no one wants to sell me one for $1?"

Of course if everyone except a single employee IS willing to do X for $Y then the company many choose to replace them.

This feels like a possible troll.

Also by the same person: I work from home as a software engineer and my job is happy with my performance. But I'm putting in little effort. Am I a bad person or employee? [1]

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I used to be a Senior Software Engineer at another company but recently I took a lower level 2 position at another company remotely. I am very good at what I do. I can usually take a well groomed agile story in any tech stack and complete it way ahead of schedule. The company always praises me for this.

But the truth is they cannot keep me busy. I know I can help out else where but my output is already so very high, especially compared to everyone else.

So instead I just sit around all day playing video games while I wait for my next work assignment. This can sometimes be days or even a week. I don't go looking for it. I have so much free time on hands that I am seriously considering getting a 2nd full time software engineering job remotely and doing this all over again.

No one is the wiser.

Does this make a bad person or employee?

[1]: https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/91282/i-work-...

Oh, I remember this. It made my eyes twitch a bit when I read that the manager wanted to put the dev on PIP, after changing the employment terms for fun, even though the dev asked about being on-call very specifically during interviews, according to the manager...

One other solution nobody has suggested.

Hire lots and lots of staff, and work in shifts. Have enough people on each shift that even when people use PTO or fall ill, someone is always working.

Nobody ever has to be on call. Instead everyone works normal hours, but someone is always available. You’ll still have to pay extra if you want people working on holidays, though.

Submitter but not OP. Just to be clear the only answer to this is a daily stipend for being on call PLUS a payout per incident (min. 1hr billing). And of course, it's opt-in.

Anything else is devaluing yourself to the poor decisions of others. "I will work harder!".

Where I work, the on-call deal is that it is opt-in, you're on one week and then have six weeks or so during which you will not be put back on call no matter what.

Base compensation which you receive regardless of whether there are any incidents during the week or not, plus hourly compensation (50-100% overtime + another 40% for the inconvenience)

Also, those who have opted in are quite flexible when it comes to covering for each other for a few hours - so you can still go to the movies or host a birthday party for a kid without fear of the phone suddenly buzzing.

Result? People are doing their best to get in on the roster, as the compensation feels worth it.

Try that.

> Should we just PIP the engineer

No, fire them without cause like a grown up and take the hit to your unemployment insurance. Don't put them through some three-ring circus act masquerading as employee development. It's undignified and disrespectful. You and the employee have a disagreement over the job description -- this not performance related. Don't try and spin it as that.

It amazes me that these B-school pricks managed to enshrine at-will employment across the country, and they still won't just fucking fire people like adults. No, instead we got one of the worst MBA-isms visited on corporate America, the PIP. Fucking cowards, the lot of them.

What's the rationale for setting up the on-call schedule? Is the system that unstable?

> on call at least once a week, including the work day and evening, once a month, including the weekend of that week.

> I should also note there is a required 15 min response time to pages. The person MUST be able to be online and fixing the problem within 15 mins of the page.

I've worked a position where I had extra duties on the weekend, so I effectively worked 12+ days in a row many times. I've also been on an on-call schedule like this with a short response time. Both of these severely impact your personal life.

You have to realize that the two most valuable things you can give engineers is their own time back and money.

This is how I would probably try to handle it: To start, it would be opt-in and not mandatory, as this type of responsibility is difficult for those with small children or other family members, such as elderly, needing care. The 15 minute response time also means you should be being paid an hourly rate (maybe even 1.5x or 2x) while being on-call, whether there's an incident or not. This is because it severely limits what you can do -- you're basically chained to your laptop and an internet connection. Anyone responding to an on-call event after hours should also be given a half or full day off the next work day. Weekend on-call should at a minimum be given a day off the following week, preferable two.

In many jurisdictions suddenly "mandating" that an employee be on call every week/month would be a proposed change of employment contract. I.e. the employee would be fully within their right to refuse until the employer makes an acceptable offer, if at all.

Also, this "manager" sounds totally clueless...

Over here the standard usually is 50% hourly pay for being on-call. On-call requires you to be 15-30 minutes away from whatever you can use to fix issues, usually work laptop + internet connection. Oh and you need to be sober (...enough to answer the phone while sounding sober =)

As soon as something happens, you jump to regular overtime pay so if it's on a weekend+Sunday, you're making around 200-300% pay. If it's just after others logged off, you're getting normal pay, maybe 50% extra depending on the company.

I know a lot of people who have paid off loans just by hogging all the on-call hours they can. It's not especially hard if the playbooks are well made and nothing goes horribly wrong.

A lot of managers or CxO think they own the employees and when suddenly they change mindset, they expect it for free, there’s nothing more pity than a C level who’s more of business guy than technical and understands everything comes with a price, and yet wanted it free of charge, pay him for the extra services you require, each contract is a unique case, just because other engineers do or agreed to do so, doesn’t mean he should if the contract says otherwise.

opt-in. Pay them for it. And have a culture of fixing stuff and spending enough before shit happens, so that on-call is rare and problems don't repeat too often

From my own experience, I understand, being on call could be important for engineers, but CEO MUST understand, not all people could accept this.

So, in real life, need agile approach.

Some people just accept to be on call all time, you could consider them as your core team with appropriate benefits and value them, and respect them, really.

Second group of people could accept receive calls during their shift. This is also not bad. Value this.

And exists people, who are good workers, make great value, but could be on call very limited time or nearly no time. You should decide, with them individually, how you will work. It is really possible, some very valuable people will not be on call at all.

I love how the manager’s immediate reaction is to go for constructive dismissal.

The times I've been on-call as a sr backend dev, my compensation was one of

- $700 for any week that I was on call (whether or not there were any incidents, and more often than not there were none)

- paid my phone bill, roughly $100/mo (including data + amortized phone cost)

- free to take off the next day any time I'm paged off-hours.

There have been other times I was unofficially on-call (at small startups/companies) with no compensation, but I don't think there was enough scale/frequency for it to be a sticking point.

Incentives are important -- unlike other commentators, I agree with my management that paying extra for time spent actually working when on-call is not a great idea: it sets up a perverse incentive. We have a base hourly rate for on-call (with a half-hour response time) and time off in lieu for actual call-outs. Teams differ, but my team has separate rotas for in-hours and out-of-hours. This means that if you're up all night, you get time to sleep without needing someone to take on-call from you during the day.

An average week of out-of-hours involves precicely zero pages. This is also important: when we get paged for something, we take steps to avoid being paged for the same thing again. Not just because we value our sleep, but because management values our services being up and running so we're encouraged to fix stuff that's broken.

We did have a team saying that their services were noisier than other teams', and asking if they could be paid more as a consequence. The answer was to fix their service reliability, not to incentivise people to wait until out-of-hours to declare an incident so they trigger the bonus payment.

So long as I've got mobile coverage, I'm free to get on with my life. I carry my laptop if I'm more than 30 minutes from home, but I don't expect to need to use it.

I am amazed by how beautiful and clear the first answer is.

How nice, uncondemning it is, how it really gives the possibility of the OP is truly clueless that he's in the wrong.

Recruit people into being on call by positively incentivising it so that it's their own choice, don't force it on them.

Throwaway so I can talk honestly.

I used to work on call in non-software, as a blood analyzer Field Service Engineer for medtech companies, like Siemens, Roche, Beckman-Coulter, Bio-Rad, etc. I spent 5 years doing this.

In that industry and job it's standard to work on call rotations that last for 7 days through the weekend and repeat every 3-5 weeks depending on team size. Because the job is hands-on and at customer sites, the minimum response time is usually a bit more than 15 minutes.

If anyone is considering accepting an on-call rotation, don't. It takes over your life. At first you may think it's fun to swoop in and be the hero fixit person, or maybe you at least tolerate it because of high base pay or something. Eventually you grow to hate the sound that accompanies the callout text or email. By the end, it triggered a visceral physical negative reaction I later learned was a minor anxiety attack.

The thing managers seeking to add on-call don't understand (those who haven't done it themselves), is that when you're on call you can't do anything. Not only can you not drink (minor annoyance), you can't even leave the house for normal stuff like a movie (medium), or attend events like a kids graduation or recital (major).

And before you say "just swap rotations around on your team," I worked with about 10-15 guys and you'd be surprised how hard it is to swap. Everyone makes plans for things all the time without realizing it would interfere with on-call, like going to the gym. At the start of the year when the on-call rotations would be released to us, there was a mad rush to submit vacation requests to get it locked in before illness or other things required swapping on-call around, much less having to take field requests from colleagues that you may (will) have to rely on when you in turn need a swap, so you can't just ignore every request.

This manager and CTO are hilariously unprepared and uninformed, bordering on pure dreaming. A 15 minute max response time is criminally unrealistic, you can't even go to the grocery store. And once a week seems low on paper until you realize that depending on team size, you can easily wind up being forced to give up a quarter of your weekends for the year (as I had to).

I haven't worked on-call for software, so maybe it's different, but I doubt it's really too different.

After 5 years of all that lost time, the amount I'd have to be paid to go back on-call is so astronomically high no company would ever pay it. Actually, now that I have a kid, there's probably no amount I could be paid if it means missing time with them.

Would be an easy problem to solve with a carrot instead of a stick. Just create a bonus for being the first person to respond to an out of hours group text, another bonus for being the person to respond to the most out of hours problems, and a year-end bonus for the whole team if no out of hours problem goes more than thirty minutes without a response from one of them. They'll organize the on call system themselves with no whining and you'll only spend money on actual problems since you're not paying anyone hourly to be on call. Everybody wins.

Put yourself into the oncall rotation for starters.

For a US exempt employee it would be fairly straightforward to push oncall expectations into a role. But in other countries with robust labor protections it might be more challenging. Ultimately the solution is money.

But doing it yourself goes a long way to convincing your team it’s necessary. I personally do this as a manager and I find it helps a lot. If you get paged a few times at 3am it really helps align your priorities with your team.

Another unspoken red flag is that this app is having so many bugs in production that it requires constant attention from its developers. How are all these bugs getting past QA? Is there a legit development process in place? Who is signing off on such buggy software?

Fuck you, hire an SRE team.

Current employer is trying to have me on call for free 24/7. Not happening.

Easy. Pay them a decent salary for every hour they are on call. Simple as that.

Pay more.

Reward them for issues fixed in off hours while on call. Make a game with rewards out of it.

Money won't answer this problem. Hire someone(s) to cover this is cheaper.

Pay them for the value they provide.

*laughs in Medicine

Pay more or let them go. That’s it. If the job suddenly requires on call, and someone refuses to comply then show them the door and hire someone else with the explicit expectation that there will be on-call.

If you are begging your engineers to be on call, you have built the wrong engineering culture. Your core engineering team should feel ownership of the app, it should be their baby. What happens in this case is EVERYONE shows up when there is a site issue, and your best engineers burnt out. Instituting an on-call schedule is what a good engineering manager does to force engineers to NOT be on-call 24/7, and instead institute an equitable distribution of responsibility. I think all small eng teams should have on-call rotations, and it's the reason behind why I built https://heiioncall.com/.