[whycombinatore]

On call typically means you gotta be online and respond within 15 minutes if paged. That's abusive. If you want a person to do that, then pay them for that. As an example, on call in Amazon works the way I described, and yes it is abusive.

[sdfhsdrhsd]

Unless you're working hourly or the on-call duties weren't disclosed during salary negotiations, you're already paid for it. I'll happily take a call after hours if it means I'm in a cushy job being paid 200k/year to solve puzzles. My partner manages a Safeway and makes well under half what I do for easily twice the work, and he's effectively on-call 24/7 for his store. Is either situation ideal? No, but I recognize that even with the injustice of having to ack an occasional alert at 2am, I'm in a crazy fucking comfy spot.

[whycombinatore]

Yeah, "solving puzzles". If that's the case, surely it can wait - why does it need to be solved at 2 am? Anyway, if you're gonna be a slave for $200k please go ahead, its yo choice.

[Invictus0]

The question is whether it's abusive or not, not whether you personally are willing to accept being abused for X amount of money.

[emodendroket]

I would think the question of whether it's "abusive" should at some level be determined by observing labor practices elsewhere. Even if you don't, I doubt anyone is going to shed any tears for something "objectively" abusive if their own work situation is much worse.

[Invictus0]

> I would think the question of whether it's "abusive" should at some level be determined by observing labor practices elsewhere

Let's take this idea to it's logical extreme then. Surely you would agree that slavery is abusive. If we imagine a society where there are only slaves and slaveowners, your position would lead one to believe that slavery is not abusive, simply because it's the status quo.

This practice is abusive because it subverts the agreement that one will exchange their labor for pay within a defined set of hours (8 hours per day) and replaces it with the expectation (not agreement) that one will be "available" 24/7, but not actually "working" unless a pager goes off. This is plainly abusive, because it destroys your ability to use your free time to do things like drink alcohol, smoke marijuana, go hiking, go sailing, go for a run, etc. because you are required to be online with 15 minutes notice.

[joshuamorton]

> This practice is abusive because it subverts the agreement that one will exchange their labor for pay within a defined set of hours (8 hours per day)

But for salaried employees, this isn't the agreement. I sometimes work four hour days. Sometimes I work odd hours. The agreement, for salaried employees, isnt about hours, it's about work getting done.

If someone consents to that, swell! I think many companies are abusive in that they don't compensate oncall work enough, but salaried oncall positions aren't inherently more abusive then having a lawyer on retainer.

[__blockcipher__]

Agreed. There are way too many people in our industry who accept being treated like utter garbage, and that's a problem, but we should also be clear that at the end of the day people do need to learn to stand up to themselves and not to consent to insanity.

My previous job I was on-call 1 week out of every 6. My first on-call week I got paged 100+ times (obv many of these alerts were firing within a minute of each other, but even accounting for that I was still being woken up multiple times per night). That week was particularly bad but I was still woken up an average of >= once per week on my on-call weeks. My team - the sole SRE team - was on-call for everything, including of course the 6 other dev teams' services.

Even worse, when I would fight to get bullshit alerts removed (the alerts that don't actually indicate a problem), I would get incredible pushback from, of all people, my own manager! (who was the manager of the SRE team since like I mentioned we were the only SRE team)

So not only were half the alerts bullshit, but I was counter incentivized to actually fix the problems causing the alerts. One great indicator of how bad things were was that everyone else on the SRE team (except the manager but he somehow always had unusually light on-call weeks) had a 5 minute delay set for pages, because the vast majority of pages would resolve within 1-3 minutes.

Oh, and by the way we weren't given any extra compensation whatsoever. Indeed I was told it was "part of the job description", which effectively meant that SRE skills were less valuable than the devs, because the devs were making identical salaries with no on-call requirement whatsoever! So a more specialized and, at least at this organization, difficult skillset, was worth less.

Anyway, I quit that job, and never looked back. I still have a friend on that exact team who is still putting up with being on-call, despite the incredible impact it has on his ability to go out and do stuff (mid 20's guy). I hear him complain about it all the time. But, like most people, he doesn't have the balls to either (a) push for internal change (which in fairness I tried and failed, although half the reason I failed was because nobody else on my team was willing to stick their neck out and push for the change with me), or (b) quit and find a new job.

So...yeah. Kind of rambling but we have a huge problem in our industry with people who either "don't have lives", or kind of do yet have so little self esteem or whatnot that they can't actually say no and protect their personal lives. In most cases on-call is simply a case of someone getting a raw deal and being too afraid to admit it to themselves.

[nchie]

Is it really abusive if it's up to you to choose "Work at company X, make ~10% more but you have to be on-call for 1 week every 8 weeks" vs. "Work at company Y, make ~10% less, but never be on-call"?

Honestly, I'm not even sure how it's even remotely possible to draw a parallel between slavery and that. When negotiating a salary you'll have to take these things into account. Not worth it for the pay? Find another place to work. Jobs do grow on trees for people in our industry.

[emodendroket]

OK, fine, maybe that doesn’t work as a universal principle. But I am compensated very well for a job where I rarely have to do anything that demanding and in exchange I can’t easily make plans for one week every two months. Hardly comparable to being a helot.

[flippantdev]

> The question is whether it's abusive or not

The question on whether it's abusive or not very obviously depends on the details. Yes, lol, I am actually willing to accept $250k per year, unlimited time off that I use upwards of 6 weeks per year of, full benefits, working from home, in the event my boss needs to call me once a year on a Saturday.

Sweeping generalizations are not helpful, and will likely hold you back in your career. You should evaluate things on their own merits.

[sokoloff]

One argument is that you are being paid for it; it’s just not broken out into two lines, but the dollars are there.

If you’re making $200K/yr, maybe $150K of that is for your job and $50K is for being on-call. That seems like a more than fair price (or at least one that’s in the ballpark) for periodic on-call service.

[kelnos]

In my experience, often people paid more end up not having on-call duties. I know several people who have negotiated high salaries from the start of their employment along with a stipulation that they will never be on the on-call rotation.

In my own situation, I removed myself from on-call duties during a leave of absence, and never went back on after I returned to work. Since then, I've still gotten the same raises I got before.

[lumost]

An unfortunate reality of on call is that companies care about projects delivered, not disasters averted.

Unless your stepping in to right the ship when a company is on fire operationally, and can point to specific action/results you delivered to right the ship - getting pages 8x per week does nothing for your career.

[redisman]

If that was the case we could easily see it in the salaries of on-call versus not on-call positions. This is clearly not the case.

[shados]

That's mostly because our industry is a bit of a mess. We clearly have different people doing completely different roles that are in the same career ladder with the same title. Forget on call, some folks with the same titles and same salaries often do easier or harder jobs. That's a separate problem.

Salaries in the industry have a lot of expectations baked in, like the expectations of being able to learn and train yourself without the company having to pay for it (aside the occasional paid book). Being on call is another. That some folks can get the same pay regardless of their responsibilities or how hard their job actually is is, indeed, a problem.

[the_jeremy]

I interviewed at Brex, and they required getting online within 5 minutes of being paged. (I did not get the offer, but I would not have accepted the offer after learning that.) Where I currently work the response time is "ideally within 15 minutes", which is a lot more manageable, since plenty of places I like to go are within 15 minutes of my house. My job pays more than average because of on-call, it's 1 week out of 6, and there's probably an average of 1 call out of business hours per week (mode is 0).

[splatzone]

5 minutes is absurd. You'd basically have to keep your laptop with you at all times

[syshum]

>>On call typically means you gotta be online and respond within 15 minutes if paged.

No place I have ever worked has this kind of oncall policy.

Most I have seen have a response time of 1hr, note resolution, but response.

Amazon is large enough they should have people staffed 24/7 just by staggering the timezone codes at the different offices. This is how Cisco TAC works, you call them you get what ever timezone code is "day time" at that time.

So I would agree that 15min on call is abusive, luckily this is not my experience as "typical" in the industry, hell even fully staffed 24/7 call centers typically do not have a 15min response time

[joshuamorton]

Call centers and oncall are different. Oncall is "when Facebook suddenly stops working, who is responsible for figuring out why and fixing it". These systems often have SLAs (either internal or public) in minutes. Response (ack and log on) times for these can be 30 minutes for less relevant services, but some have 15, or even 1-5 minute response times for highly critical stuff.

[msh]

1-5 minutes response time is not "Oncall". It's being at work.

[conradfr]

In France you're necessarily compensated for being on call and then paid when you are paged.

[glandium]

Furthermore, if you do get called, you shouldn't go back to work until 11 hours after you finished handling that call.

[flippantdev]

French salaries for senior developers are less than entry level developers in the US.

I have bootcamp students with 6 months of software development experience making more than top developers in France, lol. The few extra Euros you get for being on call hardly seems worth it.

There's a reason French workers are almost always rioting. Low pay and very few opportunities.

[lovecg]

How do salaries in France compare to the US?

[irtigor]

I don't know about France but in my country that's also factored in the law and hiring offers except for jobs that are on managerial level (them the law says you don't have clock in but you also pretty much don't get to clock out and you mostly get paid well for that), which doesn't apply for developers and that means you get paid less if there is no "on call". Basically your base pay is the same on company A and company B (assuming they are truly equal), but since company B requires "on call" that is extra work that gets compensated based on your hourly rate or double that if it is during night time, in the same way for the same job in the same company who ever works night shifts get paid twice as much as the daily shift (before taxes).

[rvnx]

3'000 to 4500 USD monthly for a SRE

[ActorNightly]

They do pay people for that - the salaries at MAANG are inflated as is.