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Comment by Plasmoid | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if engineers are going to start refusing to do on-call. "Sorry, it's going to take me an hour to get to the office because I'm not allowed to work remotely".

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Snark aside, that's not how oncall works at Amazon.

The oncall person has a laptop (and perhaps a pager), and they are expected to remote connect ASAP when needed. That was the norm well before Covid; doesn't make sense to wait for a commute before responding.

But then maybe after you do the first level of triage, if it's still ongoing, then you go in to the office.

Pending/Arrival of Technician

sorry boss. stuck in traffic on 520/i90/insert your fav bridge

reply 90 min later.

I hear a fair amount of this sentiment floating around. Not so much "I won't do oncall" but more so a deflation of moral -- if you want clock punchers, we can be clock punchers.

Setting a SEV2 to "pending" does prevent you from getting re-paged during the weekend when you're at home (where work, as I understand it, does not get done).

Instant PIP. That's how Amazon works.

People have sued and won over being asked to check emails off the clock.

I think there should be a automatic overtime law. Every minute beyond 40 hours should be automatically billed to the company.

Use the laptop spy software that companies have been conveniently using anyway to enforce this.

Huh, there are exempt vs non-exempt employees and I believe all software employees are exempt (just like in all places I worked as FTE) which means they are not entitled to overtime pay.

People here talk like they have just invented the wheel.

i don't agree with the mandate but at the very least, if they're going to do this they should absolutely exempt workers from returning to office during the periods they are on-call!

when i was there and it was 3 days a week on call definitely wasn’t exempt

Nor was it before the pandemic.

we already do that on my team- you can hardly respond to a pager in 10 minutes if you commuting. I suppose it's an unofficial policy but we never got any pushback from it.

On call? I never had to do any kind of support of any of the software products that I worked on. Why would you waste eng time on something as trivial as support?

Is this an American corporate thing?

Do you work on software that gets sold to customers? Often, uptime guarantees are included in contracts. If your software breaks, somebody has to fix it.

> Why would you waste eng time on something as trivial as support?

Because eng is the only people who know how the software works if it breaks, who else can fix it?

I would also say that good support is not trivial (this is not eng specific, it's a company wide initiative) and can be a competitive differentiator

I do work on software that is used by people. Nu software is usually embedded and I both create and fix bugs. :)

I just never had to be on call for anything. I fix bugs during business hours. :)

> Is this an American corporate thing?

It's a "Our company has sufficiently-complex software that we sell to customers that pay us enough money to justify calling in one or more programmers outside of regular business hours to help handle problems that one or more of those customers considers Very Serious that our (IME often very, very knowledgeable) support staff can't figure out." thing.

It's a solution to the problem of "our servers crashed at 2am, the product isn't functioning, and we have no one working right now capable of fixing it"

How does it work at EU/UK companies?

I guess this is more about the kind of software that I write and support .. during office hours only. I wouldn't dream about picking up the work phone during non-office hours since I'm never expected to.

idk what Wojcii does. UK companies have on-call.

In my experience its more for critical time-sensitive systems that run in off-hours (i.e. if this job fails overnight it needs to get fixed before x time or we'll be bleeding massive amounts of money).

So even if there is tiered support, they'll want an SME on some aspect of the system on-call as a fallback for higher/highest level triage.

Oncall isn't user support. Amazon (and a lot of services) are supposed to work correctly even outside of office hours and someone needs to be able to fix things. That's one downside of software as a service.

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