cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/2933587

  1. How much extra do you get paid for being on an call rotation?
  2. Is the salary/benefits the same for inconvenience of being on call and working on an incident?
  3. What other rules do you have? Eg. max time working on an incident, rota for highly unsociable hours?
  4. How many people are on the same schedule with you?
  5. Where are you based, EU/US/UK/Canada?
  • OneCardboardBox@lemmy.sdf.org
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    1 year ago

    Policy is 7 day rotation, 24h a day. Must be available to respond within 30m.

    1. ~$800 US a week. More if there are holidays. Get paid even if no incidents occur.
    2. I get phone and Internet reimbursement that normal devs don’t get.
    3. There’s supposed to be a policy where if I get paged between 10pm and 6am, I don’t have to show up to work for 11h. It’s not strictly followed in my team, but I always try and get my value from it.
    4. 7 others, so I’m on-call for 1 week every 2 months.
    5. Job is US based, but company is EU owned.

    I’m an SRE though, so our on-call is different from on-call for our product devs.

  • CameronDev@programming.dev
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    1 year ago
    1. $150 per day, call out to office is $275, and the start billing hours as per normal. (AU)

    2. Mostly worth it, call outs are rare, but when it rains it pours, so can completely ruin a weekend.

    3. Have to be within 1hr of the office, which implies staying sober.

    4. 3 people, 1 week rotations.

    5. Aus

  • dracs@programming.dev
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    1 year ago
    1. We get paid $70 per weekday and $105 per weekend. I think it’s $140 for public holidays.
    2. Eh, it can be a bit annoying at times. It’s pretty easy to swap with people as needed. I believe we’re allowed to opt out of it too, some of the other devs have. Since we’ve started it we’ve tuned our monitoring scripts that false alarms are pretty rare.
    3. Any time spent on incidents is rounded up to 15m. Which can make it feel quite unworth it if you get an alert in the middle of the night. Unsurprisingly since they reduced down from an hour it’s taken at least 16m to investigate any alert.
    4. We’ve got a decent number of people on rotation that I’m only on call about three weeks a year.
    5. Australia
  • RagnarokOnline@reddthat.com
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    1 year ago

    $150 per week of on-call.

    It’s almost never worth it to me (we almost always get at least 1 call during the week, if not 4-5).

    • MajorHavoc@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I worked at a place like that and I ended up saying no to on-call. It depends on your leverage, of course. I was able to tell them “I’m here to fix your mess, not to roll in it.”

    • agilob@programming.devOP
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      1 year ago

      Seems like you have some organizational and technical debt in the company that would be worth addressing before agreeing to be on-call

  • 108@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    To work all night and still be expected to be in the office at the same time with no compensation was benefits you got at my last job.

  • AzPsycho@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I am the lead on a team of 5 and technically we have an on call rotation but it is rarely used. In the last 3 years I have been called after hours a total of 4 times and TBH it was usually due to an AWS outage which resulted in us saying well let’s see how long it takes for them to o restore services and then someone run a safety check to make sure shit is normal.

    For that I make $120k, have unlimited PTO, and work from home.

  • cthonctic@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    We don’t have our devs on call at all. Infra / platform ops are and I think they get 750€ per on-call week (not more than one week out of four) which includes two calls or two hours of call duration whichever is reached first.

    After that it’s another 70€ per call or started hour and it’s the same if an expert who is not on call is asked to help out with an issue reported to on-call (but they may not answer / decline as there’s never an expectation to be “soft on-call”)

    Overall that’s an okay deal and some sorely needed extra money for the ops guys and gals. But all the same I’m happy that my devs don’t need to plan their lives around an on-call schedule.


    Edit: Ah sorry, didn’t even answer all the questions in OP…

    We’re in Germany and there is a cooldown time after you fielded an emergency on-call report (which is outside of regular working hours by definition) which is either 8 or 10 hours (not entirely sure since my team doesn’t do on-call as previously stated) before you are allowed to start your regular work time for the following day.
    Not sure how they tally up working hours for payroll but if you wake up to a call at 3am then certainly no one expects you to be online again at 8am. If you get a call at 10pm however then you get to start working normally the next day. (unless that issue took forever to troubleshoot ofc)

    On-call rotations are one entire week per person who participates (which is not mandatory) and the participants per pool must be at least four - which is why they are pooling web admins, DBAs and other ops folk together.
    That seems to work okay even though every so often more specialized know-how is required than the current on-call tech possesses for the topic at hand and then they request extraordinary assistance as described above.

  • sine@programming.dev
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    1 year ago

    I get nothing. So after a while I told my bosses I would simply stop doing it, since the work to compensate us was still “in progress”. It helped the rest of the team get a free day per on call week, which I guess is something, but still not enough for me personally.

    I told them I wasn’t even sure it was legal in my country (Spain) which I guess they didn’t even discuss with legal, or legal didn’t even blink.

  • croccifixio@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    We’re a team of 7 devs and the on-call schedule is 1 dev per week.

    We bill 15% of the hourly rate for being on standby and 150% when responding to an incident. Incidents are fairly infrequent, roughly 1 per month.

    The company’s based in the EU.

  • Styxia@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    My employer is suuuper generous. I get a “shout out” on Slack, and if it’s a big incident my slack profile photo appears on a slide at the company all-hands and the CEO graciously extends his thanks. Sometimes he might even say my name!

    I’m on call every 3rd week, no cap on time, usually 3 to 5 people (cross teams). base salary $175k US, no RSUs or 401(k).

    I want a new job but not getting many resume bites at the moment.

    • Potatos_are_not_friends@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      $175k isn’t bad at all. In my company, that’s senior level salary.

      Also depends on what it entails. No amount of money will ever make me do IT work and support a CEO directly.

      • Styxia@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Yeah, it’s not bad at all. For context, I’m Senior Staff with > 25yrs experience living in a M/HCOL area, so it’s on the low side. Honestly I’m fine with the base, it’s the casual indifference to the inconvenience, and there’s something about the “cheapness” of the way it’s rewarded that niggles me. Not terrible, not great!

  • jhulten@infosec.pub
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    1 year ago

    It’s been all over the map during my career. Currently there is no extra for your on call week as was an expectation of employment, but I am only on call one week out of eleven.

  • HairHeel@programming.dev
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    1 year ago

    My salary, I guess.

    Everybody on my team is required to do on-call once they have enough experience (except for the low budget offshore contractors who I wouldn’t trust to do it anyhow…)

    We have 2 people on call at a time, 1 primary and one backup. You do a week on backup, then the next week you’re primary.

    There’s no set time limits etc, but if you get sucked into some fire, people are reasonable about letting you take some time off the next day or whatever.

    All in all, there are very rarely fires that happen inside or outside of normal working hours. Making the whole team be on call helps incentivize everyone to write more stable code since it’s your own ass on the line.

  • thelastknowngod@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Would love to see some base salaries posted along with the responses. If you’re getting paid shit base maybe this is how they make up for it?

    I’m in SRE. No on call benefits at all. Base salary is 175k USD plus 20% annual bonus.

    • MajorHavoc@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Anecdotally, I’ve seen the opposite. Places with shit pay tend to not attract the ops talent needed to keep developers out of the on-call rotation. Those orgs tend to fail to recruit both the Ops talent needed to field interesting problems, and the DevOps talent needed to build resilience into the systems allowing Ops to do less on weekends.

  • spauldo@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    There are a lot of different flavors of being on call.

    I’m on call all the time. That just means I might get a phone call at any time and have to help one of our techs on a site. I don’t have to be near the office for that - it’s the knowledge in my head they want.

    I charge regular time for it.