[sfkdjf9j3j]

> To reduce the pain further, consider upping on call bonuses for the entire week

Are you guys getting bonuses for being on call? I kind of signed up for it (SRE) but I'm curious if this is more common in jobs that aren't primarily concerned with reliability.

[0xbadcafebee]

Most places, if you have a half-decent manager, they just give you the time back. If you had to wake up at 3am, you get an unspoken amount of time you can claim without official PTO, on top of not having to come in at 9am. So assuming you're on call for one week, you should still only have worked 40 hours, but you can stack up that extra time to supplement a vacation or something.

[kache_]

I get paid for oncall. Why would I do it otherwise?

[sfkdjf9j3j]

Most places with on call shifts (that I've worked for at least - VC funded tech companies) treat it as a responsibility like any other for a salaried worker. I'm sure individuals have quietly negotiated special deals as they tend to do, but it's definitely not a common practice to pay extra for it specifically.

[hotsauceror]

Of my last three employers, one had a dept/team policy of a weekly on-call bonus. The on-call person got a few hundred bucks extra (taxed, but still...), and there was a budget line item for it. It was a pretty nice token of appreciation. The other two - one had an on-call rotation no extra bonus but an informal comp time policy if you had a bad night. The other had nothing. The expectation was that the two guys on the team were on-call all the time. "Oh, we'll probably never call you."

Ironically, of the three, the one with the on-call bonus budget was the one where you almost never got called.

[howlgarnish]

There are different tiers of oncall. Needing to be online and actively debugging within 5 minutes of getting paged is far more constraining than being the third line of internal escalation that gets a phone call maybe twice a year.

[kache_]

I guess it really varies from system to system. The one I work on has pretty strict uptime requirements so we get well compensated for it.

[nasalgoat]

It's part of the salary and job description? I haven't been paid for on-call for 15 years.

[Hamuko]

I've been asked a couple of times whether or not I'd be interested in joining the on-call rotation, but I've always turned it down. I think incentive is like a couple hundred euro a month on top of your base salary. I don't actually work in ops even though I've been taking more op responsibility as time goes on, so being on-call isn't part of my job (even though the on-call people have called me at least once in the past to help sort out issues).

[cassianoleal]

My last 2 clients had both on-call compensation and call-out compensation.

The former is usually a fixed amount for a shift, i.e. 5PM-9AM during the week, weekend could either be all of it or 12h shifts alternating between 2 engineers, bank holidays might also have a separate rate.

The latter is paid on top in the case of a call-out. That can either be per incident or per hour.

In case anyone is thinking this gives engineers the wrong incentive, my experience has been the opposite. Nobody minds being on-call, and not only no one is intentionally sabotaging the systems in order to get called out.

The call-out compensation is widely seen as an extra to compensate for a night of bad/interrupted sleep as opposed to being something you look forward to cashing in, and it serves as an incentive to convince managers that systems are better off being resilient on their own rather than relying on manual intervention.

[trashcan]

Yes, but not a lot. It still adds up over time though!