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Comment by matrix87 | Hacker News Reader

Just a question for other people who have been in industry longer. I'm somewhat new, wondering if my company's oncall is "normal" or abusive

My current company has a rotating week of oncall. Happens every 2 months or so. Oncall gets paged first and is expected to be available 24/7. But if they escalate further, whichever dev or manager it gets escalated to is expected to be available 24/7

By 24/7, I mean, they don't tell you that you're allowed to sleep. They just fired a manager for not being willing to wake up in the middle of the night for pages

Edit: also a bunch of people on our team think it's normal to ping and ask for help on non oncall stuff outside of business hours (like 7 or 8)

Edit 2: I forgot to add, we are not paid anything extra for oncall (or any additional work time outside of business hours). It's salaried

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Well, my data is over 10 years old, but I know this policy because I had to pay for it out of my budget at a former employer: 1) Off-hours pager duty rotated among the team. 2) If you were on the pager, you needed to be able to get to the server room, clean and sober, within 30 minutes, although remoting in to solve the problem was perfectly fine if you didn't need hands on the hardware. 3) If you were on the pager, you got paid 25% of your normal hourly the entire time you were on the pager because your personal life was limited -- fresh snow in Tahoe? It sucks that it is more than 30 minutes from the server room -- swell party? Make mine cranberry juice. 4) From the time the pager went off, until you cleared the problem, you got your regular hourly + overtime + applicable shift premium + applicable holiday premium.

My philosophy is that if an employer is infringing on your personal life, they need to compensate you for that.

Love this. As another humane anecdote I always insisted on call includes a manager so they feel the pain. This is so they remember to treat people with respect AND so they listen when the folks getting paged say something technical needs to change in order to increase stability.

It's expected that you will wake up for pages and figure out if the issue needs an escalation or if it can wait until the morning.

If the oncall is too heavy, you should have split oncalls for day and night.

> But if they escalate further, whichever dev or manager it gets escalated to is expected to be available 24/7

This doesn't sound right, since that effectively means everyone is always oncall. You should clarify what the policy actually entails.

It seems like it's vague on purpose and whenever I ask my manager about it he just sort of non answers (pretty sure he's afraid to ask the skip manager)

Abusive. Are you giving away your time for free too during these rotations? Bonus, overtime, equal time off?

I forgot to add they don't pay us anything extra for time outside of business hours. It's a salaried position

Free labor that you're handing away. Saw your edits, sounds like you've got start carving boundaries in stone and letting colleagues know it's their loss and fault for not eyeing timezones / after hours.

thanks for checking the edits, personally it's probably going to be easier to pack my shit and go somewhere less bad

If there is something that you would like to do in your own time that you can’t do because of a work requirement, your work should be compensating you back in time or money. Can’t go drinking / see a movie / go travelling for the weekend? They should pay you for the inconvenience. Actively working on a production issue due to catching a call? They should be paying you a multiple of your hourly rate. If they’re not a charity, you shouldn’t be donating your time and energy.

Of course. Did anyone say otherwise? On-call is typically compensated for (with paid time off and/or money) on top of regular pay, with extras for any time spent on responses to incidents.

It's salaried unfortunately

Yes, this is abusive as your compensation doesn't grow with your time working. Your salary is based on an x hour work week. This system incentives poor software quality at the cost of your and your colleagues' time. My role and those of my direct colleagues is also salaried similarly with expectation of some overtime without additional comp, but that should be a rare hour or two. I do know of/work with other companies that have similar terms around on-call as yours. My employer does only 1 day at a time per engineer with a repeating 4 week schedule but we also have a support call center taking care of the majority of calls and only escalating to on call when necessary.

I’m salaried and I still get extra payments for being on-call, plus call out payments when I catch a call. Don’t work for free.

Yes. That is abusive.

Also generally if you’re ever asking if something is abusive, the answer is usually yes.

Anyone on-call or off that is woken in the middle of the night to attend to a page can take a paid 1/2 to 1 full day off (without recording it as PTO) the week after they're on-call. (amount depends on how long they were disrupted)

This is not official policy, but it's been the in-practice unwritten stance of every manager in every company I've worked at.

It's not far off my company on-call policies.

As a senior+ IC I am in a 6 week rotation as the escalation path for 6 teams. Any page goes to the team's on-call + whoever is on-call for escalation that week.

Every few months I will be paged when I am not on-call as a SME, and those responses are optional, but frowned on if you miss and don't have a good excuse.

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