Ask HN: What on-call benefits do you get in your company?

[sdfgdfghj]

I'm curious to understand how my company on-call benefits compare to others. Suggested format:

Company | Location | benefits (e.g. food vouchers, pay or anything of value) | how often do you go on-call

Feel free to include anything that you find interesting in how the on-call works in your team.

[wnolens]

FANGetc. | US | zero benefits | 15-20% of the job

Hate it, but am well paid so mostly just shut up and try to make the experience better for myself and colleagues.

If ever a shift gets bad (up late fixing something, or spurious alarms in the middle of the night), I take a day off (unreported). No boss has ever had a problem with that. They know the job sucks.

[WFHRenaissance]

Wait a minute... y'all get on-call benefits?

[doubled112]

"Included in your salary"

[mrtranscendence]

I don't have a job where I need to be on-call, but as far as I'm aware those who are on-call at my company receive nothing except time off if (and only if) they're called in. I could be wrong, though. I've been on projects where people were dismayed that such an SLA would not be available, but life is too short, and my projects (mostly Python and R packages) are unlikely to break spontaneously as long as they're used properly (e.g. version pinned).

[toper-centage]

Isn't that an incentive to break things on purpose and be called in more often?

[deserted]

I'm assuming it's not "spend 5 minutes ACKing a page, get a day off". I have seen it as "If you get paged and have to work 11pm to 2am, cancel your morning meetings and come in at noon". It isn't really much incentive to break things.

[commentsgaloer2]

I've seen different definitions of "on-call". In my company, if you are "on-call", you work your regular hours, and after that you are "on-call" for emergency prod stuff. You get a 30% bonus on that day's salary for each day you are on-call. So if you're on-call 15 days, you get a 15% bonus for that month, if you're on call a week it's 7.5%, and of course, full month is 30%. There's no difference if you get called every day or don't get called at all.

[samstave]

Thats a pretty dope scheme.

What I did for employees as we did a rotating OPs on-call, was to give the on-call emp a friday or monday off on the week they aren't on call (to be arranged with the team) -- basically, if you were on call for a week 24/7 for that on call week... when it was not your on call week - you could pick a day off of your choice.

[commentsgaloer2]

Yeah, as long as you don't get a lot of calls it's great.

What I'm having trouble figuring out is if in other companies (like yours) when you are "on-call" for a week, do you work or don't work regular 9-5 M-F? Or are you "on-call" for the entire week, with no other responsabilities, maybe similar to a doctor?

I'm assuming some companies do and some companies don't, but not sure...

[samstave]

Not sure if you have ever been "on-call"

If you run a well org... "calls" for ;on-call ppl will be few - but the stress of being mentally "available 24/7" on the on-call position is greater than the stress of tactically dealing with the random event...

Thus, lets assume its your on-call week - and you are supposed to take yur SO for Dinner for [EVENT] (anivv, date-nite, familial thing) - etc...

Do you know how much emotional/mental stress that puts on the employee?

You want your top ops guy avail when you need him in a pinch and he is NOT the guy on call, but the SME who can only solve this X?

Yeah - you best treat them well, to ensure not noly THEY BUT THEIR ENTIRE FAMILIES RECOGNIZE THEIR VALUE.

How many douche-bag managers ONLY think about their emplyees contribution as pposed to the actual contribution their family sacrifices to your fucking company?

Their kids? THier wives/husbands/relationships?

GO FUCK YOURSELF IF YOU THINK IN ANY TERMS OTHER THAN ***HUMAN***

{I AM TALKING TO IT/OPs ON-CALL CULTURE IN GENERAL, NOT YOU IN SPECIFIC. IF You are an ops/SRE/DevOps/IT manager - heed my comment..

This is the reason every employee I have had wants to work with me again.

Family first. And if you live alone, Family First (you are your family. Take care of yourself)

[gdfgjhs]

I used to be on-call during one of my first jobs. We would get called all the time, and a lot of time these were simple issues like reboot or restart a process. But it cut into our personal time. And we didn't get any compensation for it.

Team wanted to do root cause analysis and fix problems for good but there was always some new very important feature to build. So we never fixed these issues.

The way our on-call escalation worked was something like this: First, on-call gets the call. If the issue is not resolved in 15 minutes, then it is escalated to teamlead. After another 15 or 30 minutes, it is escalated to manager and then entire team. After an hour it is escalated to manager's manager. Other teams/SMEs had to join on-call bridge. Then director, VPs etc. And supposedly if it takes long enough it would escalate all the way to CEO.

I used to feel really guilty if it escalated past my teamlead. And if my manager joined the bridge, she would really scare us about further escalation and make us take all kind of shortcuts like hard reboot servers. She never cared for us to find root cause.

But every once in a while issues will get escalated past her to her boss. And then those issues would become top priority to fix for good.

Soon entire team/department learned this. So we stopped fixing issues as soon as possible. We would pretend like server is stuck, internet connection issues, etc. Wait for call to escalate as high as possible. Some of the teammates would even join online games while supposedly troubleshooting.

Eventually stabilizing our code and environment became top priority instead adding new features. We spent a few months squashing all kind of bugs, added processes like code reviews, unit tests, etc. And after those few months of hard work, our off-hours calls dropped by 90%.

And this is when I learned leadership won't care about our life if they are not impacted by their policies.

Now at my current company I do have on-call but I don't change anything for it. If I am out having dinner with my wife, and I get a work call, I acknowledge it but let my manager know that I will look at the issue in couple of hours. They can get someone else to look at it or wait a few hours. (Also by fighting for quality, we rarely ever get calls after work and management understand why I would spend time with my family during on-call week.)

[commentsgaloer2]

Yeah, 100% agree with you. It takes away a lot of enjoyability from your free time. And it also simply eliminates a lot of activities, like playing pretty much any team sport.

In my case, I like playing basketball, and I can't go to a friendly game with friends when I'm on-call, unless there's more people to rotate for the game(so if I have to leave it's not that big of a deal for the rest)

I didn't mean that being on-call it's great, far from it. I just think it's a reasonable way to compensate the employee.

It sucks to be on-call, but someone has to be. The right people have to be notified of the right alerts and not just notify everyone affected. Also, if it's been a night call, they usually allow the employee to come in late.

I think we as a collective have "dropped the ball". Doctors do "on call" on premise, getting paid every hour, or have ample wait times. We don't have any of those

[samstave]

You unlocked a memory I had forgotten: (This gets dark BTW)

---

I hired a guy as a DBA for an AS/400 system I have spoken about...

I was his manager, yet he was hired by the CIO as a DBA making twice my salary...

He claimed to have done roll-back, backup, general DB management, etc for Bank of America (bank of ireland FYI, Gianinni family)

---

He would regularly "false-flag" issues with DB backups syncs, etc...

Meaning that he would report "issues" he 'resolved' during his night shift...

It was later determined he was causing the problems because he was inept, and would report back when he fixed problems he himself caused as successes...

I resented this guy.

He was let go for lying on his resume... but the CIO "vetted" him...

a few days after he was hired, he showed up in a new BMW 5 series... [he was a russian tied to the russian mob] ---

A few years later, I googled him to see where he landed...

There was an article from the city we worked in - same car, same color, same name...

He was found dead - stuffed in the trunk...

Same guy, same name, same city.... same car...

[txsoftwaredev]

I've never heard of on-call benefits as a full-time employee. It's always just part of the role.

[RegnisGnaw]

Semi-Govt IT Organization | Canada | Time off in liu for any oncall time spent + one day off automatically for every half fortnight spend oncall | Half a fortnight every four fortnights

On average I get about 1-3 calls per week oncall with total time spend between 2-3 hours. Everything is remote.

[samstave]

How many smoots is half a fortnight every quads of fortnights? How does one only play half of Fortnight?

[deserted]

So 1 day off per week of oncall, and oncall once every 8 weeks.

Do you live in a crossword puzzle? That's the only spot I see "half fortnight" instead of week.

[McNutty]

MSP | New Zealand | paid $90/day for simply being on call, plus for any out-of-hours callouts we can choose (on a per callout basis) $100/hr with 50‰ lieu time OR $50/hr with 100% lieu time | my team's current rotation has us on call for 1 week out of every 8 weeks. Most weeks average 3-10 callouts.

I should add that we're all salary workers, the hourly rates mentioned are in addition to normal salary. Reading some of the other responses I'm feeling really fortunate.

[deserted]

This is indeed one of the best in the thread! It's rare to see both 'oncall only once every two months" and "Paid very well for both on call time and active time". Lieu time is also usually unofficial.

What does a typical callout look like?

[McNutty]

Thanks to proper change process and redundancy of key infrastructure...maybe once a month there will be a serious problem that raises the stress levels. But most of the time it is stuff like short power outages or ISP outages for non-critical infrastructure.

We also have a good bonus scheme but you're not eligible for bonus unless you've done some on call time (amongst other KPIs) . So between all of that, people don't complain about being on call here! It is pretty easy to get a day covered by a colleague if it's your wife's birthday or something. Overall it's a great place to work for!

[ingvul]

In my company the greatest benefit is that: it is not mandatory. So I'm never on-call. My free time is too valuable for just a bit more of money.

[Throwawayonc123]

Large telco | Germany | 50€ on workdays, 75€ workday->weekend, 100€ weekend->weekend and holidays.

So on an normal week 450€ pre-tax.

[theHNAcct]

45% of my days salary just for being on call.

1.5x my hourly rate for any call outs.

2x my hourly rate for any call outs on weekends and bank holidays

[2rsf]

Sweden has stricter rules about working in shifts and on call is considered one. My FAAMG employee tried to pay nothing, we involved the unions and ended up in a somewhat extra pay for the added hours, not a bonus per-se but actual pay for the used time, and a day off following the weekend.

[crescentfresh]

Industrial IoT company | Canada | $60/day ($65 on weekends) for simply being on call, plus any alarm/issue after-hours I get paid my hourly-salary-equivalent with a minimum of 3hrs no matter what the issue is | on-call 26 weeks of each year.

[chefkoch]

you are on call half of the year?

[crescentfresh]

You betcha. Once upon a time there was a 6-person rotation, now down to 2.

[chefkoch]

Let's hope the other guy stays ;)

[Simon_O_Rourke]

FinTech / US / I get paid nothing extra except occasional kudos, and even those are pretty thin on the ground these days. Many times my team often gets the blame for fixing something that some other team were responsible for.

[iSloth]

Software Co | UK | around £30 a night, £70 a Saturday, Sunday or Bank Holiday On call engineers get Mobile Phone, Mobile Contract and Broadband paid for

[Faaak]

Hosting provider | Geneva, Switzerland | 150 CHF per on-call week | 2 months per year, but we receive around 2 calls per on-call month

[giantg2]

What benefits?