Hacker News Reader

Comment by nickjj | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious, how often are people getting contacted outside of work hours for "regular" jobs?

I do SRE / Platform type of work where I'm technically on-call 24/7/365 but as a salaried worker I don't receive over time or anything like that. If an on-call event happens where I end up putting in 2 hours on a Saturday or Thursday night, I'd use my discretion to leave early or start late another day.

In the roles where on-call was an expectation, it was focused to critical downtime events, not to answer a Slack message from someone working in a different time zone or non-standard schedule. I don't even have work Slack or email on my personal phone. If PagerDuty goes off from a critical alert I get called, that's the only way I get contacted outside of normal hours.

View on HN

Google pays their oncall a % of their full-time base salary depending on the oncall tier (5 min response time vs 30 minutes).

This should probably be required - there is a different mindset and set of restrictions when you're expected to pick up a page. It also forces companies to use on-call judiciously - not every service needs a 5 min SLO.

When I worked there I spent a lot of time talking teams out of a 5min commitment. It’s really crazy.

When I quit Amazon and went to work at Google I had my mind blown by actually getting compensated to be on-call outside work hours. My coworkers shook their heads and told me I wasn't the first.

> I'm curious, how often are people getting contacted outside of work hours for "regular" jobs?

It’s all over the place. Most of my jobs wouldn’t intentionally contact someone after hours or on weekends unless it was a real emergency or urgency that couldn’t be avoided.

I did work for one company with an executive who liked to work odd hours and demanded responsiveness from everyone. Got so bad that he would regularly be unavailable during the workweek daytime hours but would start tagging people in Slack on Sunday morning or at 9PM. He would threaten to fire people who weren’t responsive enough and I once got threatened for not responding fast enough on vacation. As you might expect, turnover was very high for that company.

More generally there is a problem with people not understanding how communication tools like Slack should be used. I’ve had to teach a lot of non-technical people how to disable push notifications for every message in Slack. They would install the app and start receiving push messages for everything said in all of their channels, then they would think that meant they had to respond to it. You have to set some expectations and communicate what’s expected, otherwise some people will assume every message that appears on their phone is something that needs acknowledgement right away.

It's incredibly common in retail/food service/hopsitality/etc.

Usually about covering shifts.

Yeah, it’s basically cheap operators pushing problems down. My wife was in this business, and worked for a company that gave them full control.

Basically they paid like $2-3/hr (15-25%) more and fired people who called out twice. Their turnover and shrink was like half of the norm and it was a really successful business.

Low turnover is a big deal in that business. Transient employees pilfer like crazy and fuck up more. You yield a good ROI on shrink with smarter labor. A fucked up preparation or stolen cold cut ham can cost a weeks labor.

I'm SRE/Platform, I got paged out last night because Devs apparently can't properly crash applications. Sure, I can move hours as well but my partner doesn't care that I get off at 3 on this Friday instead of 5, she has to work till 5 and my page out interrupted our outing to the movies. Not everyone life is ultra flexible.

Same here. Applications developers and QA often can't really do their jobs, so I get roped in on every problem it seems. Plans to go out with my family on my birthday? Canceled. Plans to go kayaking with my wife on Saturday? Canceled. At this point, I am extremely tempted to leave my job, sell my house, buy some land in Wyoming or something, and just be content to be poor.

I know it's easier said than done but is there anything you can do to become an advocate for change?

I've been fortunate to have a very limited amount of on-call events. At one place for 3.5 years there was 1 event. In another place there's been 2 in the last 9 months but on the bright side these events are taken seriously in the sense that dev time is immediately prioritized to hopefully prevent them from happening in the future.

All code being written gets reviewed by someone and there's an expectation tests are included. Of course that doesn't prevent all bugs, but there's an attempt at quality control by the teams producing the code.

I think part of this role (SRE / platform / DevOps / whatever you want to classify this as) is technical implementation but also coming up with systems and workflows to reduce downtime and risk when performing deployments. Not all management is open to change but IMO it should be brought up and taken seriously. There are companies out there who care about both providing value to customers while also keeping team morale high.

>I know it's easier said than done but is there anything you can do to become an advocate for change?

IME, very few companies care they are screwing up their employees' lives. It's why these laws are good since it puts financial cost on them and gives their employees cover.

You are lucky in that you don’t have the type of employer who needs to be reined in via the law.

There are some true scumbags out there.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com