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There's a big difference, though.

In your case, you're the only employee of your business. And if you're not there the business will literally go under. And you also get directly rewarded for being there. I would guess that being 'on call' in this manner is possibly less draining on a person's soul (depending on how well they tolerate the risk of owning a business).

Contrast that with being 'on call' for your megacorporation, who isn't giving you anything extra for your on call time because they 'already pay you enough'. And where the only negative consequence for the company if you fail to immediately respond within 15 minutes is that some executive in the company is kept waiting longer than 15 minutes, or some ads aren't being shown for 15 minutes.

But if you aren't there, your boss is going to get a phone call and that's definitely not going to look good on you. And there's no bonus for fixing the problem, that was already your job in the first place. Sucks that you had to do it outside of scheduled hours, oh well.

I'm with the author of this article. Take your on-call rotation and shove it (if you're a large corporation). I'm fortunate enough to be able to take a firm stance on this point, and do so happily.

> And you also get directly rewarded for being there. ... Contrast that with being 'on call' for your megacorporation, who isn't giving you anything extra for your on call time because they 'already pay you enough'.

I'm really not seeing the distinction here. If a company offers a salary and includes on-call as part of the deal (and communicates that up front so it's not a bait and switch), how is that different than running your own business and getting compensated for your on-call time as part of a package that you sell to a client? In both cases you agree up front that you will be part of an on-call plan. In neither case are you getting a bonus for doing a good job at on-call, because either way you're just doing your job that you committed to ahead of time!

I'm totally sympathetic to people who don't want to be part of an on-call. Jobs that have on-call aren't for you, that's fine. But I don't get this idea that it's uncompensated labor, unless there are tons of people out there who somehow ended up in jobs that sprung on-call on them without warning.

The difference is agency.

Let's say I'm a business owner and I'm frustrated with the current state of the on-call system. I have options.

I can try negotiating with my clients to lessen the load in some way. Obviously this isn't always possible but it often is. I once had a freelance project that required 24 hours of on-call after a release. I negotiated release days that were convenient for me (never Fri/Sat/Sun). One time the client pushed back, I pushed back harder, and I won. In order for my push back to work I ensured that I had enough negotiating strength to do that which I planned for ahead of time.

I can upgrade my systems. For example if my current paging system is insufficient I can choose to pay $10/month more for another system that makes my life easier. I can set aside time to refactor my alerts code to make my life easier and I don't need to justify it to anyone but myself.

I can straight up refuse to do on-call and deal with the consequences to my business. Freelancer developers do this all of the time. We choose which client work to do and not to do. We can make these choices arbitrarily. Sometimes it's seasonal. Sometimes it's just based on vibes. Doesn't matter; it's our company.

Meanwhile the average on-call engineer at a large company has none of these freedoms. The underlying systems are chosen for them and they just have to deal with it.

This story is from an indian company, the on-call "expectations" might be different in your country. We were responsible for a 400k RPM service. It handled ads, so it was fairly important to the business. Whenever I had to go out for a night, or go out for a family event, or whatever, I was always able to hand over on-call to a team member for that duration. Of course, this also happened during other's on call, where I would take over. In fact, this happened daily! From ~7pm to ~9pm every day I would play football or whatever. I would always hand over on-call to another team member during this time. I usually wake up earlier than others, so I used to respond to alerts during those hours regardless of who was on call. The nights where I was staying up to watch champions league football matches or some other reason, I would take on-call as well. We just set up pagerduty's escalation order appropriately. Probably helped that there were just 5 of us in the team - easy coordination. Of course, this was my first job, and I messed up quite a bit, but I noticed the others following a similar system without me as well.

It also depends on the nature of the alerts I suppose. For us, the majority of the alerts could be checked and resolved from a mobile phone (they are alerts that could strictly speaking be resolved in an automated fashion, but the automation would get complex enough with dependencies on other service's metrics that we wouldn't be sure of not having bugs in _that_ code). About once a week or two weeks we would get an alert that needs us to look at the logs and so on.

> Meanwhile the average on-call engineer at a large company has none of these freedoms. The underlying systems are chosen for them and they just have to deal with it.

In most cases they have all of those freedoms, and the only barrier is one that's shared with the self-employed person: not liking the consequences of choosing those options.

They could negotiate with their manager to lessen the load. They could upgrade the systems. They could straight-up refuse on call.

They don't because they don't like the consequences of taking these options—and neither does the self-employed person!

> not liking the consequences of choosing those options

Correct. "Shove it" is usually preceded by not liking something.

> They could negotiate with their manager to lessen the load.

Most of the time the manager will simply refuse. As a business owner it's my decision.

> They could upgrade the systems.

At big companies this is usually outside the scope of an on-call engineer. The on-call engineer often doesn't even have commit rights to that repository.

The specific example I gave was paying $10/month more. That can be a very hard sell at a large company because their service contracts are much more complicated/expensive.

> They could straight-up refuse on call.

A business owner has much more negotiating power than an employee does.

> They don't because they don't like the consequences of taking these options—and neither does the self-employed person!

In the vast majority of cases making changes to the on-call infrastructure has very little (if any) measurable impact on the business. Like spending a week making the systems better. Or changing deploy/release dates to be more convenient.

As a business owner I can take advantage of this and make my life easier.

As an employee I have layers of bureaucracy to wade through and will probably be refused. Not because it affects the business but for other reasons.

That's the difference.

Do others not generally get extra pay for the time on call?

I have the enviable situation where I am on call for half of every month, I get paid significantly extra for this, and there's maybe 1 emergency call per year.

My last several jobs the extra pay has been a small phone stipend, and perhaps a very small token sum (maybe $50 for the week).

The only time I made significant money on call was early in my career as a contractor.

Yeesh, I get more than that per day. I didn't realize others had it so bad.

Nope. Amazon, for instance, has their engineers on call in a variety of roles with no additional pay.

Salaried tech employees do not get extra pay for being on call, generally.

The big difference is as an owner you are fully in control of allocating your time, and so if out of hours workload is becoming too much, you can choose to not work on other things in favour of fixing that. In the corporate world, there's some manager who weighs up spending two weeks to properly fix an issue or automate a process vs just making their workers unhappy and doing something that will make the manager look good in the internal politics, and often will insist on the latter.

But that's the problem with being in a bad company no matter what. If it weren't on call it would be something else that that manager would be making you suffer through. That doesn't mean on-call as a concept is terrible or that it's uncompensated labor, it just means that bad managers are capable of screwing up your life with any tools that you give them.

Bad managers are hard to predict. Even if you like your manager now, there's nothing to say they can't be promoted/reassigned/quit and you get a new manager that sucks. On-call being a thing is easier to get an answer on ahead of time

But it's meaningless a signal for bad managers because basically everyone does on call in some form. That's what this whole discussion is about: how ubiquitous it is.

The only job I worked that didn't have a formal on-call rotation ended up with me unofficially on on-call, with the same expectations as though that had been set up up front: boss calls whenever he calls and expecting an answer, and I'm left deciding how badly I want this job. Turns out management there sucked and I ended up on on-call after all.

If you find a company that actually has a good story for why they're able to get away with no on call, that might be a good signal. But if they're out there I'd love to hear from them, because most people here are just speculating about better alternatives, not speaking from experience with ones that actually worked.

At Amazon it’s common to have terrible, week-long oncall shifts with many repetitive pages. At Google they have shifts that follow the sun and they get PTO to compensate for being oncall during the weekend. Both jobs pay similarly. And I think most people joining Amazon don’t know about the oncall they are in for.

> most people joining Amazon don’t know about the oncall they are in for.

In general people joining Amazon should be aware that they're joining a company that is fiercely and proudly opposed to work-life balance.

This ultra-libertarian take is consistent but not realistic. Realistically, the group decides that some amount of work or sacrifice is not compatible with having a good life, so laws are passed that either disallow such extremes or mandate extreme compensation.

This goes back to Shabbat/Sabbath.

My friend worked for Amazon in India (software). He was often on 24x7 "on calls", which is touted as "good" here (because how else will you "learn"), during his 3rd or 4th week. By third night he was vomiting and had to visit the doctor. His manager called and had asked whether he had brought his laptop with him. His mother forced him to resign next day (he is from an extremely rich kind of family though). It is common here in most companies and among famous MNCs it is especially known in Amazon and Uber in India.

What shocks more is these are the companies that can "follow the sun" w/o breaking a drop of fucking sweat!

I have lost too many interviews just because I clearly asked for this, I always do, and I am doing it even now while I have been without a job after taking a year gap (which makes getting calls already difficult esp. with this AI and vibe onslaught). I am not giving up on this. I personally have never agreed to this which has caused lots of confrontations and stress(!!); a major source of my burnout WITHOUT ever doing the 24x7 on-call - so by just fighting it and keeping it away from me alone I was burnt out to the bits. It took me finally seeking medical advice to realise I was burnt out.

I hope this is not sounding like dramatic but even now when I have been resting, travelling for a year the mere mention of words like Splunk, VictorOps (same as Splunk iirc), PagerDuty give me minor trigger attack kinda sensation - make me very agitated.

But this is so common here. So common that it is considered one of the realities, truths. Yet, I have never understood, how, how can one agree to this? How? Is it some kind of social (if not racial) slave mentality? Is it some kind of grand coercion that they have no escape from? Or maybe it's just generation after generation subjecting the next generation to what they were subjected to while the stakeholders in the richer countries (because that is the structure) demand of this implicitly as they are stopped by health and safety laws from subjecting their underlings in their own developed home nations maybe.

Working for yourself is totally different.

It's like demands from tech executives for long hours: "I worked long hours to make myself rich; why won't all of you work long hours to make me richer?"

I somehow do not think OP is working for themselves. They are a contractor there. I do believe contracting is just being an employee on slightly different terms.

> I work alone and only have one reputation. I don't want to be that contractor forever known for destroying a clients business.

Hard to say, interesting observation:

> I am currently supporting four wineries that are processing thousands of tonnes of receivals 24x7... I don't want to be that contractor forever known for destroying a clients business.

If the 'clients' being referred to are the wineries, then it sounds like a self-run company. IE: the company is operating as a contractor to the winery clients, for whom (the wineries) a failure of the contractor (the company) would be a disaster for their business (the client, the wineries).

OTOH if "clients" refers to the business (the company) that in turns does the support for the wineries, then yes - an individual contractor.

The distinction would seem to me to really change the entire tenor of the comment. I'm curious which it is.

Would it make sense to hire someone? When you run a solo person business getting over the mental hump about hiring someone is difficult. If rewards are great and things are stable (16 years is stable) what is preventing you from hiring someone to help with at least some aspect?

"The E-Myth Revisited" calls this working on your business as opposed to working in your business. Otherwise you don't own a business, you own a job.

I thought about hiring somebody five years ago, but the fact is my client has gone itself from a small/medium sized business to a corporate, from no IT staff to now thirty and they are working to replace the production systems I wrote the middle of this year. To be frank having that much responsibility as a one man business is quite scary. Also when I originally wrote the systems for them I had no clue it was going to get this busy and no clue I would be 24x7 support, also at 62 years old I really want to start winding down :-)