[einichi]

No pay for being on call by itself is still poor, particularly when it comes to swapping rotations between team members to provide flexibility amongst each other.

You’re making yourself available 24/7. That has a non trivial lifestyle impact which I’ve always thought deserves more than is typically rewarded.

[sokoloff]

As long as the on-call coverage is as specified at the time of hiring, this is just a difference in form of payment.

If I receive 100 total units of compensation, I'd way rather get 100 units of base pay (and 0 on-call pay) than 90 units of base pay and 10 units of specific on-call pay. (What if the company eliminates on-call? What if I get injured and my insurance only covers base pay? Severance is usually based only on base pay; I would not be paid on-call while I'm on PTO or other paid leave, annual raise percentages typically apply to base pay, etc...)

[dangus]

How can the on-call coverage be specified at hiring? Can the company guarantee that my team will never shrink or that the page rate won't increase?

What will financially encourage my company to stop paging me overnight if there isn't a labor cost to the company every time an on-call incident occurs?

> What if I get injured and my insurance only covers base pay?

Insurance payouts can be easily based on wages that include reported commissions, tips, and overtime. They can very easily be based on an average of past actual wages paid in the last handful of months at the company.

> Severance is usually based only on base pay

Severance is a completely optional practice that is based entirely on what the company wants to do. I would argue that severance is more accurately based on "The lowest safe number to pay to this particular employee to make sure their termination does not become a legal risk."

> I would not be paid on-call while I'm on PTO or other paid leave

But also, PTO days and on-call days don't indersect. If you took time off during an on-call shift you would be trading it with a team member, so you would never lose that extra wage.

Example: I'm taking a week off, it's during my scheduled on-call shift. I would normally get paid my on-call hours but I didn't this week. But when I get back from my vacation, I'm picking up an extra on-call shift because my team member covered my shift when I was on vacation.

Now, I'm taking a week off, but it's not during my on-call shift. I wouldn't have been paid on-call hours this week anyway. When I get back from my vacation, I am going on my normally scheduled on-call shift.

I personally have never felt compensated dynamically enough for on-call schedules. Most corporate jobs seem to pay for a sliver of the life disruption, maybe paying for half my phone and Internet bill or something like that. They all say that the on-call is baked into the compensation, but I'm not so sure.

[ddingus]

>"Severance is a completely optional practice that is based entirely on what the company wants to do. I would argue that severance is more accurately based on "The lowest safe number to pay to this particular employee to make sure their termination does not become a legal risk."

Almost right! I see it as an extension of what I call the basic rules, "I am as nice to you as you are to me", and "I care exactly as much as you do."

That does, in some cases, expand severance a little beyond the cold risk calculation. If the severance is going to someone who helped the company make it, then helping make sure they make it to their next gig is part of the equation.

Not everyone boils it all down that far, but a whole lot of us do!

Which makes your comment solid, and mine a quibble, but one I consider worthy of some discussion.

[hawaiianbrah]

Germany (among other countries) has laws around this. My company pays I think 200 euro a day that someone is on call, so my German reports end up making a decent amount in months they have their on call shifts, especially felt when the team is smaller and rotations more frequent!

[8note]

> PTO days and on-call days don't indersect.

If you have any national holidays, somebody still ends up being on-call for that holiday. I've been on-call for almost every US holiday this year.

[hawaiianbrah]

> If you took time off during an on-call shift you would be trading it with a team member, so you would never lose that extra wage.

I think this is true in _most cases_, but is not a given. I myself have encountered scenarios where it isn’t true: switching with someone much later in the rotation, only to then end up having to switch again for instance. You could envision a nefarious teammate weaseling out of their fair share with sneaky switches like this, too, though paying for it would maybe incentivize them not to!

[dangus]

Of course it wouldn’t be hard to figure out a rough average on-call amount to pay during PTO

[sokoloff]

At what point along this continuum does it just become "base salary" rather than "pay specifically for being on-call"?

[zgeor]

Not to mention that there is incentive to keep having oncall pages, because that's how you get paid. Or not participate at all. On the other hand, with a flat payment, there is a big incentive to prevent issues and not have(reduce) ooh incidents, and participate in the rota.

[jxf]

In OP's case it sounds like they do get compensated with the day off, which is PTO. It's not a trade everyone would make but an extra day off into a long weekend is one I would have taken earlier in my career.

[larsrc]

+1! You can't travel very much, you can't go hiking or biking in places without cell coverage, your whatever thing you are busy with gets interrupted, you can get woken up in the middle of the night, etc etc. That deserves some compensation.