Disagree, as do others. If my movement and activities will be restricted then it is full employment/utilization, not some quasi-employment or utilization. I didn't pull this out of thin air.
Someone has conned you into accepting less. I'm sorry.
But why? Why do you think oncall should be paid the same as full work? Perhaps you have a different definition of oncall than me, where you expect to be paged once or twice a week, and spend maybe an hour or so fixing it each time?
Why would I not charge less for this than real work? It involves much less actual work.
I'm arguing that the "5 minute response" on-call should be at regular or OT rates. If your on-call rotation is like a 1 or 2 hour response time, then I could see it being less, but the problem is that I've been at a company where the on-call was previously "whenever you get around to it" and later they changed it to "within 30 minutes" and I was not compensated any further even though it killed my life anytime I was on-call.
Why I believe it should be at the full-rate: because I don't trust the company culture to stay the same over my tenure there. My expectations for a "shit company" have to be the same as my expectations for a "good company", because a good one can turn to shit quickly.
I've been doing on-call for more than a decade and I feel I need to offer my perspective here. I worked in teams in which I would never get paged and also teams in which I'd get 100 alerts per week.
> But why? Why do you think oncall should be paid the same as full work? Perhaps you have a different definition of oncall than me, where you expect to be paged once or twice a week, and spend maybe an hour or so fixing it each time?
When I'm oncall, I need to cancel all my social engagements for that week and delegate all my errands and such to my partner. Also not drink or take any mind altering substances. I must be 'ready' at any time of day or night. I (as well as others) sleep in the same bed with my partner. If my phone rings due to an alert, my partner is also woken up. So I need to sleep in the living room for a week. From the start, this affects my personal life to the extent that it would be unfair NOT to compensate me extra. It also affects my family way more than a regular desk job should.
You're mentioning the expectation to be paged once or twice a week. If those pages come at odd hours and you need to fix them on the spot, no exceptions, failure is not an option, etc.. it's still very disturbing to your personal life. Additionally, that's a parameter which is well outside of your control. I've seen oncall shifts which turned from '1-2 pages a week' to '5-10 pages a day' after the product finally got in the hands of regular users or after the team grows in size and code contributions grow suddenly. Or even better, when you're doing such a great job that your boss promotes you in the oncall tier and now you also get to do triage for alerts coming for the whole organization.
The volume of the alerts don't and shouldn't matter. If you're oncall, you're oncall, you have a responsibility to be available at all times, rain or snow, night or day. This deserves compensation. It's the same as with regular work. Do you get paid extra when you merge more PRs? Nope. You're paid relative to the value you add to the company. Even if you have weeks in which you barely do anything. You're paid for your 'availability' first, then your work.
Some companies (some I've been lucky to work at) implement some sort of follow-the-sun oncall shift and you at least get to have your sleep and generally minimal impact on your personal life. That is great and does not deserve extra compensation, because your work hours aren't altered at all.
I'm sad that labor in the US don't consider paying extra for oncall a norm. But it's not surprising, considering we did have dedicated engineers at one time who were paid to watch and maintain the health of the livesite 24/7. But then we figured we'd make regular engineers fuck their sleep cycles by adding oncall to the list of responsibilities, because it would be cheaper this way. And everybody agreed, because 'full-service ownership' and we're already paid way more than in other fields. When the latter changes (and it will), we'll still not get paid oncall and I'd love to see the discussion when that happens.
It sounds like your oncall is far stricter and noisy than those I have experienced. It genuinely sounds like it is disrupting your life to a large extent.
"failure is not an option" is not something I recognise, in the same way that sometimes features cannot be implemented as quickly as wanted, and systems are not as bugfree as I would like. But I am expected to put in a professional level of effort.
In my experience of oncall, it means carrying my laptop to social events, not drinking, and apologising if my alarm goes off in the night. For that, I accept the deal that is offered, which is less than my normal hourly rate, but still substantial given the number of hours.
If the volume of pages increased, or the required response time was lowered, I would reconsider.
> From the start, this affects my personal life to the extent that it would be unfair NOT to compensate me extra.
I don't think anyone is arguing that people oncall shouldn't be compensated extra. It's obvious that you should be compensated for being oncall, it would be criminal not to do so in my opinion.
The difference is that it's not full time employment compensation, because you're not working your normal work expectations.
You're not working overtime because you are not working your expected 9to5 duties.
Overtime would be if you were actually sitting in front of your computer actively working on your project (coding, answering emails, bugs, feature requests, etc). Just being available counts as a remunerable activity but I don't think you'd be able to convince anyone that it counts as actual overtime duties like you would if you were actually overtime. It's "doing something" more than it is "doing nothing" but it's not as involved as actually "doing work" like you normally would. Hence, you are being paid for it, but it's not your full rate.
Because it chips away at one of the only valuable things you have: autonomy and peace during your leisure time. That exact thing the fruits of your labor actually are supposed to prop up and maintain.
Given two job offers where one is regular employment with 100% rate and a stand-by job with 80% rate, which one will you choose? In both cases you'll have to waste 8 hours a day on your employer's business.
On-call outside of working hours is simply a second job, so the above argument still applies.
Except you did. There are pretty specific legal definitions of "on call", what it means and when you get paid for it in almost every jurisidiction. I've never seen one that pays you time and a half for being "on call". This is not the same if you get called and actually work overtime; that's regular rules. How a company entices (or doesn't) for taking a shift is up to them.
Start a company, make this a policy and advertise. If engineers truly care about this, they’ll come to you. Perhaps they just care about total compensation And their RSUs more than this minutiae?
> If my movement and activities will be restricted then it is full employment/utilization, not some quasi-employment or utilization.
I feel like this is a very absolutist statement that does not look at the actual nuance of the situation. I could maybe agree that a 5min response time (like Google Search or Google Ads SREs go through) could be argued to be "work" (although I honestly don't think so), but I don't quite agree with the definition you are using to define "full employment/utilization".
Assuming I have to show up at the office every morning at 8am, this is basically saying that my employee is restricting my "movement and activities" outside work hours because if I can't get to the office in time by 8am then it means I am not free to do whatever I want off work. If I wanted to go to Hawaii the same morning as I'm expected to show up at work, and have no ability to get back to the office in time for my shift, does that mean that my employer is restricting my freedom of movement hence I should be compensated for it?
> if I can't get to the office in time by 8am then it means I am not free to do whatever I want off work.
Er, yes, that's exactly how it works? You can't take a vacation in the middle of the week and expect no reprimand. Thus the same should apply to oncall.
That makes no sense. What sane company would pay you 1.5x to be oncall instead of just paying someone 1x to do actual work as well as respond to pages when they happen?
That's exactly what the company should have done in the first place. The 1.5x is to disincentivize that. A lot of industries (mostly unionized tbf) have it.
Yes: there is no shortage of people who literally value their life so little that tech companies get away with exactly what you describe. They can because the vast majority of engineers don’t value their own lives. That’s what the time they’re trading is: precious seconds of their lives.
There is no point in a company paying someone 1x for 8 hours of work and another 3x for 16 hours of oncall when they can just hire 3 engineers and work 8 hour shifts. That way they only pay 3x (instead of 4x) AND have the engineers do engineering work 24 hours (instead of 8 hours + 16 hours of oncall).
Companies need to stop squeezing by on free or under-compensated labour from their workers and instead hire sufficient numbers of people to cover the work they want to be done.
