[swensel]

I don't like having to be on call 24/7 either and would prefer to work on a team that has 24/7 ops, so the devs don't have to do that. However, in the case of a startup where the devs also do ops, what is the option? I don't understand the part where you said that this means something in the company is not working and needs to be fixed if devs need to be on call. What happens if something goes wrong with an environment and an auto restart doesn't fix the issue? I am curious because I'd like to have a better answer for potential startup opportunities that won't spend money on a 24/7 ops team and ask this of their devs.

[vidarh]

The option is to compensate for it on top of extra salary to the point where you get enough volunteers for rotation, and/or hire for it.

I had a side gig that very explicitly was being hired to be the guy that gets woken up by PagerDuty. They paid me about an extra $1k/month purely for having my phone on in addition to what they paid me for the time I spent dealing with actual issues. Even then $1k/month was only enough because most of the other work I did for them was explicitly to improve site availability so I could ensure the platform was resilient enough that I rarely got woken up. In effect my hourly rate for being woken up probably translated to $2k-$3k/hour, with it sometimes going half a year between being woken up, before suddenly a bad release might cost me sleep a few nights in a row.

But having felt the stress of this on a full-time basis in the past, without that kind of compensation, I don't think it's cost-effective to have your dev team serve this role vs. having a few people on retainer to at least triage and try the obvious things. You're going to pay for it with staff that do not get proper rest (even when the phone doesn't go off it'll be there at the back of your head).

[toast0]

I think you're basically right. At the end of the day, if the servers catch fire, you probably need to call the responsible developers for help getting things back on track.

The real questions then are how is the work divided, what does escalation look like, what steps are taken to reduce incidents outside of office hours, what's being done to allow for urgent maintenance to wait until office hours, etc, and also like how well is that all working, and where is the leadership in this?

I worked somewhere with not great answers to a lot of these questions, but it was okish because the cofounders were waking up with all the pages and hoping on to fix things too, and I had a mediocre experience with a dedicated ops team at a previous job that I didn't want to repeat. Eventually, as the team got bigger, we made a lot of things better, including on call responsibilities.

[rjzzleep]

Hire for it? Don't coerce your employees into doing something you you don't want to pay for?

What most people don't think of is that when you're on 24/7 duty your salary is less than half of what it should be.

Halfway decent enterprises will reimburse you for off-hour duty usually at multiple times your normal rate plus a minimum pay. Or just hire someone in a different timezone.

The reality is though, most people don't need panic calls from their CEO at midnight and the company would still do perfectly fine without it. There really is no excuse for this.

[varjag]

Isn't that what the company in question was trying to do, hiring the devs who are willing to do 24/7 too?

[danShumway]

Sure, but then the lesson to take away from this is that the company in question apparently isn't offering enough to make that job worthwhile, and that's not the fault of the people turning them down.

When the company phrases their rejection as "we don't think you're committed enough to do this", that's when things smell off to me. They're hiring for a specific role, they should act like it.

As an analogy, if you hire me to build software, and then slip in that you expect me to spend 10 extra hours a week doing cold sales calls, I might turn down your job because I don't want to do sales, I'm an engineer. And the problem at that point isn't my commitment to the company, the problem is that the company hasn't figured out it needs to make the sales tasks part of the job description.

How do interviews get to this point? How does a company get to the point where you're talking to the CEO, they're laying out their exit strategies, and the job requirements still haven't been made clear?

> "we feel like you are not willing to put enough skin in the game" or "everyone else sees the opportunity here is is willing to work their asses off, why are you different?"

Those quotes say to me that the owners are viewing this as a question of "loyalty" or moral obligation, not as a normal part of a job negotiation. A good test: if the CEO feels offended that you ask for more compensation in exchange for being online 24x7, then this isn't about trying to hire a specific role, it's about their ego/entitlement.

[varjag]

You could be right and it could well be the case, but we don't know really. We are only aware that the GP turned them down, but it's quite possible they had the position filled.

One person wearing many hats is rather typical in small companies and early stage startups. Being asked to do extra is not something insulting per se, as long as you compensated accordingly, either with more hard money or (a lot more) equity.

It is a non-starter proposition to many, which should be respected. But it's not something borderline criminal.

> How does a company get to the point where you're talking to the CEO, they're laying out their exit strategies, and the job requirements still haven't been made clear?

Look, if we're still talking about a startup it could well be the interviewer is the CEO, the guy who brought you coffee is CFO and you're interviewing for CTO/dev/ops/support in one :)

[sundaeofshock]

> CTO/dev/ops/support in one <

That one little phrase sums up the problem with most startups. Hire someone who doesn’t know any better and tell them they are the “CTO”.

[michaelt]

Where I work, being on call means being able to respond to a call by being at your laptop, with a reliable internet connection within 10 minutes - and able to keep working for as long as may be needed.

That means no stopping at the gym on the way home, no going into the city to see a show, no lengthy car journeys, no getting drunk, no going on dates, no evening classes, no school plays, no sport that takes you more than a block away from home, no taking your kids to the park to feed the ducks.

The idea you could have people be on call constantly sounds crazy to me.