| > Extra compensation or time off is usually a bad idea for on-call responsibilities, because it puts the wrong incentives in place. I sort of agree, because yes "just throw a little money at it" is the wrong response. But more money is definitely part of the answer, because unless you negotiated that amount of overtime when you signed up you're not being paid appropriately for your work. > think of what engineering work you can do in order to improve the on-call experience This is key. During your incident response review for each incident it's important to also keep a summary of overall incidents so you can use statistics to properly prioritise your engineering effort. It sounds as though none of that sentence applies to the OP, and none of it ever can. Which means the advice to get out is about all that's left. In my current job I get a token on call allowance (~2 hours pay a week), and it's expected that I will respond to problems, fix/restart/hack the immediate situation into something that works; then come in during normal work hours and analyse the fault, come up with a plan to stop it happening again; and implement the plan. Note that only the immediate fix is "after hours". Some of the fixes are significant - we're re-writing chunks of C++ code in Rust because there are weird memory issues{tm} in the C++ code (because of course there are). Other fixes are trivial, an assert fires and we say "oh, that can actually happen" and code accordingly. Right now the on call allowance feels like money for nothing, because we have had two alerts in the last three months but they're paying that allowance to 3 people every week. The boss says "you're doing very well, keep it up" because in his view no problems is a good thing :) |