[exsmelliarmus]

> If an organization thinks their systems should be available 24x7 they should staff people 24x7.

I’m a software engineer. I’m paid well partly because things like oncall are necessary. It’s priced into the compensation.

> There is no situation where it’s ok to contact someone to do work outside of their work hours.

It sounds like you should find a company that agrees with this opinion. I don’t agree.

[_l4lu]

This attitude is very common with software engineers and I find it baffling. Is it some kind of inferiority complex? I doubt Warren Buffett worries that he is overpaid and demands to be woken up in the middle of the night for some self-flagellation. So why do so many software engineers think "I am paid well so I deserve whatever the company throws at me"? You are selling something: your skills, expertise, and time on this planet. These things are limited and valuable. Negotiate the price and terms of the sale!

[option_greek]

I would say its a superiority complex : thinking software engineers are paid well and hence need to be ready to sacrifice more to maintain this superior position.

And of course also because the risks of bad or interrupted sleep is not recognised widely and mostly ignored.

[drewcoo]

Which is why you can also see the exec team paged in the middle of the night, right? Because they're paid well and need to sacrifice?

[joshuamorton]

Yes, and had their vacations cut short and other such things than rank and file employees would tolerate far less.

[strken]

Every oncall rotation I've been in for the past five years has had C-suite executives in it. Earlier the CTO, currently the CEO.

[Invictus0]

The executive team elects to do it, and they also get a fuckload of stock incentive to do it. Not the case for lower-rung engineers.

[SpicyLemonZest]

I’ve definitely seen my exec team get paged in the middle of the night, and they didn’t give any indication that it was unreasonable or uncommon. If anything they seemed to enjoy it, which to be honest I do as well. Being woken up to solve a problem (on rare occasion) can be validation that you’re an important person working on important things.

[staticassertion]

Lots of other fields have on calls or out of work expectations. That's part of the job, and you're compensated highly.

It's not like on call is a shock or something, it's not "whatever they throw at me", it's just... part of the job. My sister is a dentist, she has to be on call sometimes, it's not a shocker or something you don't know when you're signing up for the job.

You're implying that people aren't negotiating, but that's baseless. Software engineers are highly compensated because of these expectations, and we all negotiate accordingly.

[rodgerd]

> Lots of other fields have on calls or out of work expectations.

Yes, and in many of them there are call-out fees and overtime. Programmers and sysadmins have convinced themselves that, as "professionals" they are not aligned with traditional working-class constructs like this.

[staticassertion]

> Yes, and in many of them there are call-out fees and overtime.

Why is that any better than just getting paid overall more? Lots of companies also have internal policies like "if you get called in on a weekend take a long weekend next week" etc in my experience.

[rodgerd]

Because then the company has a financial incentive to reduce call-outs and overtime.

[wildrhythms]

>we all negotiate accordingly

This is quite a sweeping statement to make. My first engineering job salary was non-negotiable. I was told to either accept it, or they 'rapidly' move to another candidate.

[staticassertion]

I meant more collectively. But of course, yes, it's sweeping. It'll change regionally, or based on experience, or company culture, etc.

But I don't think it's unfair to say, especially in the US, that software engineers are highly compensated.

[skybrian]

While I agree that in general they shouldn’t feel bad about asking to be being Paid More (tm) you are making unwarranted assumptions about how happy they are with their current employment situation. You don’t know them, don’t know how much they’re paid, and don’t know how well or badly they deal with being on call.

There is nothing immoral about deciding you’re happy.

[nzmsv]

I never said it's wrong, I just said I don't understand it. I think my post sounds a lot less moralizing than the one I am replying to. On-call is not some kind of basic virtue. It is simply part of a job description, and that's a business contract.

I personally think that a much healthier alternative would be to look for a position where one can maintain their physical and mental health, and give back extra income to worthy causes. There are many organizations much more worthy of my time and money than a bunch of managers who are too cheap to hire people for a follow-the-sun support org. But I'll accept a job with on-call if I think the rest of the deal outweighs the negatives.

It's still fair to call out on-call as a negative though. It's something to be aware of when accepting a job and for companies to keep in mind when recruiting.

[ghaff]

I'm honestly not sure how it's different from consultants who are only home on weekends after a week at a customer site in $RANDOM_CITY, engineers who have to basically live on a job site for weeks at a time, any number of professions that involve a lot of travel including weekend travel, or even the other salaried professions with on-call such as doctors.

If those all sound awful, by all means, do something else. But they're tradeoffs that people accept for their chosen job and compensation. My first job I would regularly be in shipyards and offshore for weeks at a time supervising some job. There was a modest allowance after some length of time but it paid better--and was almost certainly more interesting--than some routine office engineering job.

[coldtea]

>There is nothing immoral about deciding you’re happy.

It is when it sends a signal (about the job, market, etc) that also affects others.

[shukantpal]

No it is not. Because your signal is the truth for you.

[coldtea]

Truth is not morality. "Truth for you" much less so.

All kinds of scumbags have their "personal truth" that justifies their actions too...

[shukantpal]

The truth is always moral

[skybrian]

If you believe that software engineers are not paid enough and it's morally important to do something about it then apparently I sent the best signal of all by retiring and thereby increasing demand for everyone else. But since this is absurd, I won't pat myself on the back too much.

More generally, free markets are doing absurd things all the time (see Matt Levine) which makes it hard to extend moral reasoning very far without getting the equivalent of divide-by-zero errors. So I don't think we should be all that concerned about how it affects the job market in general when negotiating with an employer. You know what you want better than you know what anyone else wants. Ask to be Paid More (tm) if that's what you want, but if you don't want to, you don't have to and people saying there is some kind of moral imperative to try to become even more wealthy at a faster rate can be ignored.

[dcow]

Under what moral framework?

[nzmsv]

Not moral, practical. The majority of places that do on-call do it because it's the default.

That's the problem with on-call: it somehow took on moral undertones. And as a result it does not feel safe to speak out against it.

If on-call was widely seen as a negative (that a few people like because it gives them a sense of importance, more power to them) then there would be far fewer companies pushing for it as the default. As it stands, most people suffer silently for lack of an alternative. And the first step towards change is to make it OK to publicly say that on-call's a negative, a health hazard, and other options exist (though they may cost more).

[jonas21]

The CEOs of every Fortune 500 company (and many smaller ones too) are on-call 24/7.

[YZF]

1. They get paid 10's of millions of $'s a year.

2. I doubt this is true. I've worked (and do work) for fortune 500 companies and have never ever heard of a CEO being paged for some sort of emergency. Presumably there can be some sort of crisis where they'll have to be involved within some reasonable time (extremely rare) but that's not exactly the same thing. That's why they have people working for them. That's not to say that some CEOs (especially for smaller companies) don't work very hard.

[PeterisP]

They definitely get involved when there's a meaningful impact on the company operations. Every business continuity plan involves top management; I've personally seen it in mid-size companies, and for the really big megacorps, just recently I was looking at a case study on the Maersk (#297 in fortune 500) management response to a cyberattack and it pretty much starts with the chairman being woken up at 4am local time. (e.g. source at https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/maersk-reinst... )

"presumably there can be some sort of crisis [...] but that's not exactly the same thing." - I'd say that it's exactly the same thing; on-call engineers are (or should be) just on an escalation path for crisis/emergency events; top managers are higher up in the escalation chain (if it's not a routine thing that others can easily resolve) but they're on escalation chain for every aspect of a large company. Of course, those events need to be rare - for example, as the original article states, up to 2-3 actual calls per year for a person being on-call; we should probably make a serious distinction between "on-call for emergencies" (which should be rare) and "routine out-of-hours support" (which might get triggered every week or even more frequently, obviously not an extraordinary event but a standard business process), which is something quite different and should have different solutions than emergency escalation.

[rocgf]

I also find it baffling that people still think about things the way you do.

It's not necessarily some kind of inferiority complex or anything else, it's about the free market.

[coldtea]

"Free" market just means people bound by monetary considerations...

[rsj_hn]

It means no one has to trade with you if they don't like what you have to offer in return. If you consider that "bound", then OK, but that language doesn't illuminate, it hides.

It is a painful slap in the face when the market doesn't price what you have to offer as high a you like. I know a friend who was convinced that her calling was to be an artist, but always had a hard time selling her works, and often complained about the unfairness of life. I guess she was "bound" by monetary considerations by not being able to make ends meet as an artist. Eventually she gave up and became a hospital lab tech and is well compensated. So the market was telling her that her skills as a hospital lab tech were much more valuable to society than her skills as an artist, even if her own preferences were otherwise.

At the same time, some other artist can buy an entire oceanside condo for one painting, because the market does value their output very highly.

That's all that we're talking about here. It is "free" but that doesn't mean that you'll be able to get whatever you want in exchange for your own output.

[nzmsv]

The free market works the other way too though. If lab techs were in high demand (as they are), and your friend's employer was demanding an unreasonable schedule, she'd be free to jump ship to a better job. Right now software engineers have that kind of market power, so why not use it? If tomorrow the market decides we are overpaid, we'll either accept it or change jobs like your friend did. What I don't get is not using the power the free market gives you because?...

[taormina]

Feel free to drive down your own value. This is the exactly what people are talking about when they say that they are looking for young and naive employees to exploit who won’t know better. You’re paid the big bucks because you have a very in-demand skill. Being dumb enough to answer a call at 3am is entirely orthogonal.

[abc_lisper]

Please heed this. This is the lesson you don’t want to learn from experience

[philosopher1234]

Why not?

[abc_lisper]

Because, you undervalue your time, you open yourself for abuse. May be that project that is behind can be done by you after work, as you sometimes do work then anyways. I have seen some managers who are acutely sensitive to this and repeatedly use this to their advantage while charming the underlings. Next, being on call means it is difficult to plan that long vacation, or a unplanned night of shit faced drinking with your buddies, or unable to sit with your kid in the night when she is sick. A perspective of life as unpredictable events helps reinforce this idea. You are, with out compensation making life predictable for others while making it less predictable to you. Third, your mental and physical health. Sleep disorders because of restlessness, groggy mornings and the stress that comes with normal working hours will take a toll over long term.

[taormina]

Let's do the laziest back of the napkin math. Let's pretend you make $100k and work 2000 hours a year. You make $50/hr. Let's say you do 50 hours of week between trying to impress your boss and getting woken up to do call. Congratulations, you are now a $40/hr employee!

Also, in my experience, the people who aren't getting woken up at 3am (aka. your boss) don't value the time and effort needed to stabilize these systems. So they want you working on the new shiny product feature that will get them promoted. Fixing the crappy data pipeline that shouldn't alert every other night isn't a priority when you aren't the one being woken up.

Well, it should be a priority, but I also don't work at that previous job for this exact reason. I took a nice pay increase and have never had to be on-call. Don't settle.

EDIT: Original 2000 hours comes from 40 hours a week * 50 weeks. Like I said, back of the napkin math here.

[Volundr]

> Also, in my experience, the people who aren't getting woken up at 3am (aka. your boss) don't value the time and effort needed to stabilize these systems.

There's the rub. The issue isn't being on-call, it's not prioritizing making sure the system is robust so that on-call is boring.

In my last job there was no formal on-call, but if shit was going bad I'd be expected to resolve it, or track down the right resources to do so. In my current there is a formal on-call rotation. In my 15 years at the previous job I probably got called out of bed 3-4 times (and due to my roll I was the first call, if anyone got woken up, I did, and then had to wake anyone else needed). In my 7 months in the new job it hasn't happened yet.

When everything is on fire, it feels obvious to me that asking your $x00k employee to put it out isn't unreasonable. What is unreasonable is making that the plan instead of having robust fire-prevention systems and making that the exception.

[staticassertion]

> Congratulations, you are now a $40/hr employee!

Another way of thinking about this is that you've invested 10 dollars of your paycheck into your career. I worked way more than 50 hours a week when I started my career. Subsequently, I was able to drop out of school early (by 2 years, saving 10s of thousands of dollars), get a full time job, increase my compensation by 50% within 2 years, and then by 200% the following year when I changed companies.

By your math I'm sure I was getting paid 1/3rd of my actual compensation. But that has more than paid off in terms of the investment.

[Invictus0]

You're making the assumption that being on-call made some kind of difference to your career progression--as other commenters have noted, no one is doing good or interesting work during on call hours. You're just the company bitch and you get to do bitch work. Other industries require hazing like this too: finance comes to mind. But not every software firm requires on-call; you just picked the wrong company and allowed yourself to get screwed.

[willcipriano]

I was on a team that had lost a lot of it's members. We worked hard to keep up and were on track to meet deadlines. Some time went by, we were working nights and weekends and every time we asked we were assured that they were hiring but "couldn't find the right person". At the same time, every week we would hear about a new hire in management. They were magically able to find some new hires as soon as deadlines started to slip, had we not worked those nights and weekends I am certain that they would've found someone to hire much earlier (the first guy they did hire said the process took three months, they were clearly dragging their feet). Too bad I learned that lesson after already spending the day of my daughters birth in long meetings about testing environments.

Why would they pay for something they can get for free?

[haswell]

Speaking from experience, the ensuing burnout and lack of sleep leading to other health challenges isn’t worth the “life lesson”.

[skybrian]

Downvoted for insulting someone you don’t know anything about.

[coldtea]

Downvoted the above for hollier-than-thou preaching and missing the point.

[NullPrefix]

same

[JackFr]

Being on call is separable from your role as a software developer and can be compensated separately. My wife’s (non-technical) organization has a requirement for a junior and a senior duty officer to be available 24/7/365. These shifts are compensated and available for people to sign up for. If shifts don’t get filled, they fall to senior managers in a rotation. You can be sure these managers somehow pay enough that they only very rarely need to take shifts themselves.

[coldtea]

>I’m a software engineer. I’m paid well partly because things like oncall are necessary. It’s priced into the compensation.

Or you priced yourself down.

[gh0std3v]

> It sounds like you should find a company that agrees with this opinion. I don’t agree.

I agree that on-call is necessary in certain professions (e.g, doctors). I also agree that if an employee is willing to do on-call and they are compensated accordingly, then the practice is still ethical.

However, to call someone to do work outside work hours is unreasonable. On-call is considered work time, so I am expecting to be contacted during that time. However, if I'm not on-call, then it is not time for me to work, and I shouldn't be contacted by my company and feel pressured to answer the call.

[oceanplexian]

I think a lot of founders would compare their startup to having a baby. Imagine if someone said “I want to have a baby but absolutely no waking up at 2AM”, you would be laughed at.

Likewise, lots of engineers in tech are compensated in equity so you have a stake in the business. in that case the lines on what constitutes personal time are less defined. I don’t see it as a bad thing if I’m on vacation and need to grab a laptop and help on an incident. I’ll take an extra day of vacation later or sleep in the next day. Life doesn’t have to be so inflexible.

[__blockcipher__]

> Imagine if someone said “I want to have a baby but absolutely no waking up at 2AM”, you would be laughed at.

Okay, now imagine that I have a baby. I offer you a .0001% ownership in the baby, and you have to get (potentially, but often actually) woken up for 1 week out of every 6.

Does that sound like an arrangement that a rational, healthy, self actualized person would agree to? Of course not. You're getting all of the downside and none of the upside. In fact in many cases the "leadership" team themselves aren't even on call!

[pseudalopex]

Parents wake up for their own babies. Very few engineers have a meaningful stake in the business. And on call hours aren't proportional to equity generally. Imagine if someone said they expected someone else to wake up for their baby in exchange for lottery tickets.

They said on call is ethical if an employee is willing and compensated accordingly. Additional paid time off is compensation.

[koheripbal]

I partially agree. It really depends on how often I'm called when on-call.

There is a world of difference between being called twice per year, and twice per week.

...and it's fine for that to be priced in as long as those expectations are as clear as the salary when I take the job.

[danny_codes]

Are you very young?

I feel like young people are more exploitable and don't understand what they're sacrificing by being available all the time. I was the same way at the beginning of my career. Fortunately I had a good team, but there were definitely times where my sleep and health suffered from being on-call because I didn't know how to say no.

[UncleMeat]

But loads of software engineers don't have oncall. And these jobs don't pay less as a rule. If you aren't at least getting overtime pay, then you are being scammed.

[sys_64738]

> I’m a software engineer. I’m paid well partly because things like oncall are necessary. It’s priced into the compensation.

It might be priced into your compensation but that's the exception. If you are paid "market rate" and on call is "priced in" then you're underselling your services by a large margin.

[tragictrash]

Haha, That's why you still have to do on call.