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Comment by relaytheurgency | Hacker News Reader

I, for instance, am on call and required to have my work phone on my person 24 hours a day unless I'm on vacation with a pre-arranged backup.

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Oh god, that's terrible. I had no idea that was a thing. How is that legal? I can imagine why a 24/7 tracker app would be a significant problem in such a case.

Are you not from the US? Being "on call" is pretty common in certain professions. Doctors, for instance. A lot of vital IT workers are on call all the time. If a server goes down in prod, who are they going to call?

Not only that, but if you're an "exempt" employee in the U.S. (as most IT workers are), you don't have to be paid any extra money for being on call 24 hours a day.

However, the woman in the article was a sales executive, not an IT worker. If the company had to be able to reach her in rare emergencies, they could call her on her personal phone if her company phone was turned off.

"If a server goes down in prod, who are they going to call?"

In the good old days, before companies got cheap, they used to hire three shifts of operations staff who worked 8 hours each.

While I don't disagree with you on the perceived unfairness of a lack of overtime, it could be argued that my base salary is higher than it would be if I were only available 8 hours a day before OT kicked in. Not saying I agree with the statement, but it's an argument to have for sure. I certainly make much more at this job than I did at any job where I got overtime, mainly because the kind of jobs where you aren't exempt are usually low skill/low pay.

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