Anyway, I prefer Mon - Thu, Fri - Sun shifts.
That reminds me of Amazon's abysmally bad employee discount, which was "10% off anything on the site, up to $100 / year".
I would be interested in how response times are?
Mine is 15mins. So I have to respond and be in a incident call within 15mins.
If you got paged you'd get 150% of your hourly pay, per started hour. So if you got pages at 22:00 and again at 3:00 that's three hours of pay, regardless of each issue only taking 5 or 10 minutes to fix.
That's roughly $1000/€950 per week of on-call, plus the hours. You'd have four/five of these per year and you could pick up an extra month of pay per year with the standby pay, plus the hours and maybe pick up another day here and there.
Holidays where normally distributed on a volunteer basis (you'd still get paid, but you opted-in to those days). So maybe I'd be home on New Years, but out on Christmas, so I'd offer to cover Christmas, while another colleague might care more about being able to drink on New Years.
Originally we where almost 50 people handling on-call, so you'd have one week per year, but that's not sustainable, you forget how to handle common issues or how to fill out incident reports and handoff correctly.
The most stupid on-call schedule I ever did was midnight to midnight, every other day... It was only me an my boss. That was incredibly stupid, because you couldn't go out on one day, and the day where you could go out, you had to be careful about having one drink to many.
My team have put a lot of effort into only rarely being paged: a normal week on-call won't have any out-of-hours activity at all.
If there was an actual incident, you'd get paid as if that was overtime worked, and it depended on when it occurred (e.g. weekends and public holidays carried a higher than normal multiplier). There were also limits on how much rest you'd need to be guaranteed, etc.
On average, our actual incidents were relatively infrequent, and the pay out mostly depended on the size of the team, which dictated how often you got rotated in. It worked out to something like +10% salary though.
I'm not even sure if doing on-call duty without compensation is legal in my country.
In the past, there were some cases of "fake" incidents, but the amount of documentation makes sure that the company is able to crack down on this.
I really wish we'd gotten paid for hours worked rather than TOIL, not for personal preference but because it would have aligned the company's incentives better. We might actually have fixed some of the problems if not doing so cost the business a tangible sum of money.
Still, it was better than working for free.
Worked well until E&Y came in and "fixed" things with a strategic plan.
Big ecommerce companies and even global brands like AWS and BMW require 24x7 on call without any compensation.
But let's align incentives. Any time spent fixing issues on-call is compensated 4-to-1. Workers may accrue compensation time, and any compensation time in excess of 20 hours is paid 10-to-1 when the employee leaves. The idea here isn't for workers to accrue and cash out comp time, but instead to give an incentive to the organization to ensure workers use their comp time.
Let's align incentives, what's hard on the worker should be hard on the owners and management.
When that's done, chill for a while, do some recruiting and education in the workplace and think about what the next realistic change ought to be.
Oncall should be compensated, always. The oncall person should get a flat rate just for being on standby, and should also receive a per-page payout, and that amount should be larger if the page happens outside regular business hours.
Then management will actually realize there's a cost to pushing features and pulling in deadlines at the expense of robust engineering practices. Or they can decide they are fine with that, and paying the oncall person is a cost of doing business they way they want to.
I've seen too many instances either issues they come up during oncall never get fixed, and just page and page and page.
I will never again work at a company where oncall is "just a part of the job". I value my own time too much.
I was going to say, this would almost certainly be the outcome. Companies have no problem throwing millions at AWS, DataDog, etc. They certainly aren’t going to blink at an employee making a couple hundred bucks extra per day.
In my company we get approximately 800€ for every week of on-call and each hour of intervention is also compensated with salary.
From my point of view this should be high enough for the company to be willing to focus on on-call issues. Ater years of being on-call I must admit the salary is comfortable but it doesn't cover the pain and constraints of being on-call: being kinda "stuck" at home basically, lots of consequences on private life etc.