We're fortunate that our team has a European counterpart, so we don't have to respond at night. We do 9:30 am -> 9:30 pm, and there's 5 members in our rotation.
If your expected response time is of the order of 5 minutes, then you are not "on-call", you are working 12 hour days and your compensation and time off arrangements should reflect that.
I suspect that if the company is currently getting that amount of extra work (over and above a normal length working day) for free, then you're unlikely to be able to get them to change that. If it was me, I'd be looking for a role in another team or company that has a more realistic approach to on-call.
Any potential extra impact on your current colleagues that you leaving might cause is the responsibility of your management and up to them to mitigate. How your current colleagues decide to react to the on-call situation should be up to them.
Good luck resolving this, I've been in work situations that had unreasonable expectations myself and I appreciate how stressful it can be.
>If your expected response time is of the order of 5 minutes, then you are not "on-call", you are working 12 hour days
I'm a new dev at a fairly young startup. We have recently started an oncall process and we have similar response times for oncall though our workload isn't nearly as heavy since our scale is low. What's the standard in oncall response times/expectations?
I don't think there's any real standard, since it very much depends on application SLAs, industry sector, size of the on-call team, geographic location, length of on-call rotation, frequency of call-out, how realistic the management are, how much inconvenience the team members are willing to put up with, etc.
For example, I work in London and it would be unreasonable to expect that someone could travel between home and work on public transport and still meet a response SLA less than one hour. That would likely be a different length of time in another location, or if people worked 100% remotely, for example.
My opinion is that if you have a response time less than say 30 minutes, then you actually need to be compensating people for sitting in front of their computers ready to respond immediately, whether that be in the office or remotely.
Unless call-outs are very frequent (in which case there are underlying reliability, capacity management, and/or alerting issues which need to be resolved), then on-call isn't really about the extra time spent working, but the restrictions on what one can do whilst on-call.
To use a fairly simple metric: if an on-call SLA means that I have to be concerned about whether I can pop out to a local shop or how long I can spend in the shower, then I don't think that I would be on-call, I would be working.
Of course start up environments (especially early stage) are always different from more corporate environments and there are generally greater resource constraints in general. For a start up I am usually looking more at what valuable experience I can gain, rather than maximising remuneration (subject to a certain base-level of course).
However ultimately the question remains the same: do I think that what I am getting out of this role is worth what I have to put into it? There are probably roles in which I'd be willing to put up with the inconvenience of very short on-call SLAs, because either they paid very well, or I was gaining very valuable experience.
Whether a role fulfils ones own expectations for the reward/expenditure ratio is a question that everyone has to decide for themselves.
Wait, so you have to be available within 5 minutes between 9:30AM -> 9:30PM for a whole week?
I hope you are getting paid a lot. What happens if you get paged while taking a shit? Do you get reprimanded if you can’t get off the toilet in under 5 minutes?
We're fortunate that our team has a European counterpart, so we don't have to respond at night. We do 9:30 am -> 9:30 pm, and there's 5 members in our rotation.