[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.

[emodendroket]

OK, that's definitely a shitty situation. But if you imagine that instead you were empowered to shut off nonsense alerts and address causes of real ones, you wouldn't have actually eliminated on-call, so I'm a little confused about how you conclude from this that "all" on-call is abusive.

[Invictus0]

What's actually happening in this thread is that people like your friend are post-hoc justifying their own abuse so that they can remain internally consistent with their past decisions. Classic cognitive dissonance.

[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.