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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.