I 100 percent agree. I'm sorry you feel the need to post under a throwaway, but I'll put my name on this to back your point up.
On call is a deal breaker for my future job searches, and I am considering leaving the company I just joined because they sprung it on me while never mentioning it in the interview process.
On call is justified in my opinion only if someone will die if the problem isn't handled. Or if compensation is dramatically increased and agreed upon in advance.
On call is justified in my opinion only if someone will die if the problem isn't handled. Or if compensation is dramatically increased and agreed upon in advance.
What if the company will die if the problem isn't handled? Many companies (mine included) provide a service that needs to be highly available 24x7 (customers run automated tasks 24x7 against our service). If our site regularly went down for hours at night (or even for an entire weekend) because of a software problem that no one could fix because the developers weren't picking up the phone, we'd lose customers and eventually, the company would go out of business.
Even a 10 minute outage is a significant event and requires a full RCA for customers. We try hard to architect for high availability, but bugs do happen.
The answer here seems simple. Include on-call time in compensation, and fire developers.
Note that for some developers, you're never going to be able to compensate 'on-call' hours appropriately due to their evaluation of the opportunity cost of their time.
Salary shouldn't be a thing that a company can ever hide behind.
Labor laws really do need to cover the maximums that an employee can be expected to work. They should also make going above those maximums exponentially more expensive in 'bonus time'; and the accumulation rate shouldn't magically reset after time, but only after time back on normal/reduced work load and duration.
Also, while I'm on this subject, 'full time' work should really begin at more like 24 hours / week. Benefits for part time work should be pro-rated. (It should never be more cost effective to split a full time job in to part time jobs. That is defrauding the economy and making others pay for the costs of your labor.)
That's just fine, as long as on-call expectations are fixed as part of the job offer, just like salary is. If the on-call expectations change for the worse later, that is exactly the same as a salary cut.
IANAL but I believe (in the US or in NYS at least) this would be grounds for quitting with full unemployment coverage (you are not usually eligible for unemployment benefits if you quit, exceptions include the basic nature/hours/wage of the work being changed without your consent, since that is philosophically similar to having your old job terminated and being offered a new, worse one)
Get any on call expectations in writing when taking an offer if you can, just like you'd expect salary in writing
The real problem then is engineers being unwilling to vote with their two feet.
In a market as friendly to software developers as we're currently in, the correct response to that is totally "great, consider this my two week's notice, I'll go to this other company across the road that pays the same salary but doesn't demand I have on-time call".
(No, the response to every problem with your work environment should be to get a new job, nor is that even a realistic possibility for many. The economic argument still stands.)
It's a valid answer provided that on-call was part of the conditions known during hiring and salary negotiations. If we've negotiated a salary of $X for doing Y, but then you suddenly want Y+on-call, then you're going to either pay more or find another employee, because $X is simply too little for that.
Because, math? That company may have a team of 5 developers, how do you split those 5 developers across 3 8 hour shifts that cover 24 hours/day 7 days/week + holidays + vacations + sickdays to get 24x7x365 coverage without doing an on-call rotation.
When you're in a 100 or 1000 person company, then it's easier to have dedicated after-hours support staff (or staff working from multiple timezones around the world)
No one is saying that it should be "free", it's built into the salary - every company that I've worked at that's had an on-call is very clear about on-call rotations during the interview.
Except you're saying that small businesses should get to ignore that math, and get stuff for free.
" That company may have a team of 5 developers, how do you split those 5 developers across 3 8 hour shifts that cover 24 hours/day 7 days/week + holidays + vacations + sickdays to get 24x7x365 coverage without doing an on-call rotation."
You hire more people so that you can, or you don't make deals you can't afford. Honestly, why is this so hard to understand? Why do you feel so entitled to things you can't afford?
Again, who said anyone is getting anything for free?
My company has 100+ engineers, all of whom do a on-call rotation, they are all aware of it when the sign up, so that on-call duty is included in their salary. The employee can evaluate for themselves whether or not they think the salary is sufficient to cover that, but as far as I know, we've never had a candidate turn down an offer due to the on-call requirement (though I don't know that they'd always tell us that's why)
But really, does any engineer join a small company (in the USA) without assuming that they'll be on-call after hours? Even in early stage companies that haven't launched a product yet, there's still after-hours support to be done to keep dev systems running, fixing broken builds, etc.
And that overseas team often has little-to-no ownership so they call people while they're sleeping or half ass everything. This problem is magnified if they're contracted and not actually employees.
as someone who runs an on-call team, and is woken up frequently still as a co-founder, if someone sprang that on you, you should quit asap, and tell them why. people need to know that on-call is a decision, not a mandate.
the only reason my team puts up with it is because we're 100% remote. they never leave their families, so that's the trade-off.
That sucks, but hey, at least you get compensated for it. I think in some states they even have to pay you for a certain amount of time at minimum even if you only work for 10 minutes.
It happens very rarely. The times it does they do it under the guise of me being potentially fired if I answer wrong. Ie they want immediate clarification of what I did in some crisis but really just want info. Not paid and I'm actively searching for work.
On call is a deal breaker for my future job searches, and I am considering leaving the company I just joined because they sprung it on me while never mentioning it in the interview process.
On call is justified in my opinion only if someone will die if the problem isn't handled. Or if compensation is dramatically increased and agreed upon in advance.