Yeah. 12 months in to a job there was a big push to move to the cloud, all devs go on 24/7 mandatory support. You would be required for a week to be on call, rotating in your team, so every 3-4 weeks depending on devs in the team.
For this you where required to always have internet access, return a phone call within 10mins to acknowledge a issue then be investigating within 20-30 mins. This means for 7 days if you wanted to drink you could not, you could not travel to a place without phone signal, you always had to have a laptop and phone on you. Essentially your personal time was not personal time, you are severely inconvenienced and for 168hrs you where essentially at work. For this you got 200AUD extra in your pay packet minus tax. It was non negotiable, this was no small company but at the time a recently IPO’d company with a shit load of cash. If you look at it as 168 hours for the week on call due to loss of personal time it’s a massive pay cut. I would of come out significantly ahead working minimum wage for just the sat/sun and loose less personal time.
Discussing it with my managers how I did not want to loose personal time and was happy to do it for free on a best attempt I’ll answer a call if I get it and available vs being absolutely available and accountable resulted in “but you get free lunches here, take it for the team”, the perks where used as leverage. As you said the cost of lunches to the company was peanuts, worse than that I had special dietary needs so never utilised it.
Pretending to be naive can be useful from time to time.
"I'm sorry, I have dietary restrictions that prevents me from enjoying the free lunch. It would be a great bonus if I was able. How about this you forgo the large cost of the free lunch and instead pay me the minor amount of overtime for the rare times I'm called out." (they always present that you will rarely be required to fix something off hours, call that bluff)
The only directions they can go is "Well that will cost more than the free lunch" or "we demand it" so either you win the argument by having them make your point for you or you will have a nice casus belli to find a new job.
For this you where required to always have internet access, return a phone call within 10mins to acknowledge a issue then be investigating within 20-30 mins. This means for 7 days if you wanted to drink you could not, you could not travel to a place without phone signal, you always had to have a laptop and phone on you. Essentially your personal time was not personal time, you are severely inconvenienced and for 168hrs you where essentially at work. For this you got 200AUD extra in your pay packet minus tax. It was non negotiable, this was no small company but at the time a recently IPO’d company with a shit load of cash. If you look at it as 168 hours for the week on call due to loss of personal time it’s a massive pay cut. I would of come out significantly ahead working minimum wage for just the sat/sun and loose less personal time.
Discussing it with my managers how I did not want to loose personal time and was happy to do it for free on a best attempt I’ll answer a call if I get it and available vs being absolutely available and accountable resulted in “but you get free lunches here, take it for the team”, the perks where used as leverage. As you said the cost of lunches to the company was peanuts, worse than that I had special dietary needs so never utilised it.
Didn’t stay long after that