[uberman]

I worked as a developer and consultant at a big name SV company and was not compensated for "on call" time and in the end, not knowing any better just "sucked it up".

Now I would definitely ask some questions if I felt that this responsibility was falling disproportionately on my shoulders.

Do all employees at my current level have the same on call responsibilities and schedules? If not, how are custom schedules arrived at?

Do more senior employees work on call rotations and if not, at what job level are they excused?

Are a couple that seem very reasonable to me.

[ymnska]

100% agree that these are questions that should be asked, and if you're in position to, hard-balled as a condition of joining something.

It's more complicated in practice than it sounds though because before you join, you'll get a manager well-versed in giving you either non-answers or "soft" lies. For example, they'll say, "Yep, we have an on-call schedule. People go on every few weeks (probably meaning: 3-4 days every few weeks), and it gets a few pages, but isn't too bad." They'll generally refuse to get into specifics, and most people who are excited about the new opportunity, won't drill into it.

After you join, it's kind of too late. Best case you've got a team who's also willing to go to bat with you to get some fixes in, but more standard case, you'll find yourself on the wrong end of a pager without a huge amount of negotiating power unless you include the nuclear option of just getting out.

[Psychlist]

I've had one job where they pulled that. One week a month I was "on call", which meant waking up at 3am most nights and working through to office hours babysitting/bullying the system. In theory we got time off to compensate, in practice if we arrived back in the office after about 9am we'd get funny looks and the boss would pop past to ask what the problem was. "I just worked 5 hours" did not matter, we got that one hour of extra time off and that was it.

There was no engineering effort to fix these problems, it was just accepted that "sometimes the overnight jobs don't work".

When I quit I made it clear that that was the reason. And even though I quit during the 90 day trial period I still gave them a week's notice. The boss was not happy, but was adamant that the system he had put in place was working well and did not need to be changed. He wanted me to be on call during my weeks notice period!

There's two fixes: technical, by stopping the callouts from being necessary; and stopping management from imposing the callouts. Or you can get paid enough to make you happy with the callouts. If you can't do one of those you really need to get out.