Or is it baked into your base comp?
Reason for asking; management is about to start asking folks to be on call. I'm not sure what to ask for or if its normal to not get anything extra.
It's good that you're thinking about compensation for this work, because it is work, it is extra, and it should never be done for free. Don't let your employer guilt you into it because "everyone else is on call too." Everyone should have a compensation bump then.
Is this legal where you live?
In my previous team, when we got on-call it was roughly 1 week per month (we were 4 in the team), we got an on-call phone, and we were compensated 600€/week of on call without counting the actual interventions. Just being on-call was paid. Having to intervene was compensated on 15 minutes « slices » based on our salary. So if I worked 5 minutes I was paid 15. If I worked 16 minutes I was paid 30. Also we legally needed 11 consecutive hours of sleep, so if I stopped working at 6PM and had to intervene at 0AM, I wouldn’t come to work the next day before 11AM. Oh, and week-end/holiday interventions were paid double.
All of this made sure we almost never had to intervene, because making sure the prod doesn’t break, ever, was top priority.
What can you really do if they lie in the interview?
Stop letting them make you feel bad for renegotiating salary after the job description changed, and call them out on the complete bullshit "team player" phrase. If they fire you, might suck for a bit, but hopefully you'll end up better off. If they keep you, start looking for another job ASAP anyway. Good companies don't play those games, fuck them.
At Google my team got $1600/wk because of the required SLA. At a startup I worked at, we didn't get paid extra, but we got an extra day of PTO for every week on call. (This is technically pointless, as we had unlimited PTO, but we did the rotation Thursday-Thursday and specifically didn't have meetings etc. on Friday so that the 2 people that were oncall last week could take a day off and not miss anything.)
Frankly, I preferred the cash. Many people on the team didn't want to be oncall, and so that meant more money for people that didn't mind, like me. It was good at the time, but certainly not for everyone.
Big companies with critical services do 24 hour oncall by having 3 offices and by having the oncall folks only be on call for their normal 8 hours. (12 hours is also somewhat do-able.) Even with this setup, extra compensation is expected. You can't go for a walk, or take lunch away from a computer, see your doctor, etc. And, you probably weren't going to work the weekend. So even 8 hours oncall requires compensation. I believe the Google SRE book goes into detail on the strategies that Google uses; SRE teams and SWE teams have different models.
At startups, this doesn't really work, because you're by definition a big company by the time you have 3 offices with dedicated SRE teams. (These places might call themselves startups so they can underpay you, but ... they're not.)
If I were starting my own company and needed oncall, I'd just expect that the founders/executive team take on the off-hours duties. You're the one whose company goes out of business if you have a bad outage. Being mad at some underpaid software engineer after the fact doesn't bring your customers back. And basically, it's unreasonable to ask people to be oncall. Some people with no life will do it, and they appreciate the cash, but other people literally don't have the ability to be available 24/7 unless you hire them an employee to take care of their kids or sick relatives or whatever.
With tech looking like a seller's market again (thanks AI!), I don't think you'll be able to build a team of talented and experienced developers if you require oncall. So get ready to do it yourself, or pay accordingly.
It would be informative if someone made a list like the extended exercise window list [1] for on call practices and comp if it exists
However one piece of conventional wisdom - on call rotations should be no less than eight people, and not much more. Going on call any more than one week in two months leads to burn out. Any less frequently than that you risk losing familiarity with on call procedures, the observability systems, etc.
I guess Google is at $2000/wk for second tier now!
How often are you on call.. the whole week Mo-Su?
20 years earlier I was a kid working at an ISP earning 31k USD salary with the same 365/7/24, and getting paged about three times a week off hours, and most of them being drive outs, either to the POP an hour out, or our furthest problem client 3 hours away. I had no idea that it was a bad deal. Even with all the learning I was doing ... it was a bad deal. Most of those pages during the winter were our AC freezing cause we wouldnt pay maintanence on it. 120kbtu in a 12x16 room, the AC would freeze shut, and I'd drive in at 2am to leave a window open. One side of the room was -10F, the other side was 120F. We didn't stay in business. It's how I got in with life and went to college.
If either I was in a more junior position, or the on call issues were very frequent, then I might feel differently.
I don't know your situation, but I would ask: what has changed? Is the product turning out to be less reliable than expected, or has the previous arrangement for support failed somehow, funding cut etc.?
In a previous job we built projects with 18 month dev cycles, and then went into a 6 month session of intensive support, basically being on call every day. But we always knew that going in.
Employees are employees, replaceable, out source, lay-off
Being in it together does sometimes payoff good luck
I had different arrangements for this in previous jobs, but I think the availability pay + callout pay is a pretty fair way to deal with it.
In general though: I was always paid for on-call on top of the normal pay and likely wouldn't take it otherwise. (Unless it was explicitly added on top of normal comp of course) It's work and your time - that's mostly what the employer wants you for.
Back when I was in a technical role I used to be rostered on-call every few weeks. That included being on a conference call within five minutes of being paged (yep, oldstyle). This meant planning ahead to be at home at all times that week.
We were paid to be on-call and paid hourly if a call actually came in.
These days I see people saying they're expected to be on call and not being paid more than they're already paid. That's crazy.
No, and no.
> Or is it baked into your base comp?
Also nope. :(
> management is about to start asking folks to be on call. I'm not sure what to ask for or if its normal to not get anything extra.
I'd say it's quite reasonable to ask; my understanding is that SRE at Google is +$10k vs. SWE; you could attempt to do research on those positions to see what the relative difference between them is and use that as an example of what the market pays.
But in my experience, you can ask, management will "listen", and then proceed to do bumpkiss. Management theory these days, AFAICT, is geared towards driving company's into the ground by trying to extract more and more value from less and less, until there's nothing left. Good luck.
I hope they listen: IME "yes, we'll pay" answers here keep good engineers around, and "no" readily drives out good engineers.
I'll also echo what someone else says in the thread:
> If I'm working past 5pm, sometime in next few days, I will work X hours less.
Particularly if it cuts into sleep: there's no practical benefit to even trying to work, if you're sleep deprived: https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/emres/longhourstraining/impaired.h...
If they aren’t going to offer payment, try asking for an extra day of PTO for every on-call incident or simply for the flexibility to “leave” early when there’s a heavy on-call period.
For all the extra effort of having an on-call system it's used less than half a dozen times a year, but the boss likes being able to charge for it.
Of course, stuff does go wrong, so we do fix a few things after hours if something happens & people are around - we currently just give the team time off in lieu of any hours worked. It's not perfect but most people are OK with it at the moment as it's very infrequent.
Not planning on instituting formal on call until we can ensure people are paid for it but using this period to automate & alarm as must stuff as possible to reduce it to as close to zero as we can.
I’ve always given a comp day per week on call so they can recover.
One place had some magical mythical theoretical formula for adding some unspoken amount to your bonus, but it was never broken out.
Oncall should never be considered built in, it just leads to managerial abuse, and poor practice because its "free".
A symptom of this is when fixing bugs is not prioritized because the on-call engineer is a meat robot that “fixes the bug.”
The culture the manager/boss want to give to me is that:
- `It is a bonus to have on-call opportunity, so that you can have alternative leave.`
BTW, this is one of the biggest software company in the country I stay, when I heard what he talked to me, I decided to leave this place.
> I did one on-call from 11PM to 1AM to fix one product issue, and they want to give me 1 hour alternative leave for my contribution. It is not fair.
Anyway, I wasn't there anyway. Be aware of this company/culture, `on-call opportunity is a bonus`, no matter how much they pay you.
We ended up with a generous $ stipend per on-call shift, as a % of salary, as well as time off in lieu.
As generous as it sounds, it was an equitable solution in the end, given that we were supporting a multi-million dollar platform that was not fully stable at the time.
A lot has been said by other companies like "your salary should cover that", but I say nuts to that. On-call should be something people actively want to go on. It should be equitable, not forced.
Our head of engineering gave us 1 day time off in lieu (TOIL) per week of on-call support. I was pretty happy with that as comp.
It ends up being around a 10-15% bonus.
Everyone understands this to be the standard, and if they try to give you less you should quit or find out that your house is a cellular dead zone.
I'd love to make this the reality, but it's just not.
My last workplace didn’t give special compensation.
In my situation when we had this setup first level on call handled about 80% without ever needing to engage the second level on call because we could triage the situation make the customer happy and they were fine to defer to business hours for a final resolution.
Now the first level on call program seems like it's pretty nice incentive for those bonuses some weeks you would literally get nothing but you still got paid for simply being available. Other times when there was a particularly buggy release it was quite annoying. Annoying to the point that volunteers would sign up for first level on call and then drop out within a couple of months because they realized it wasn't always just easy money. Toward the end of the incentive program there was literally just two of us who would rotate between primary and secondary and we had some particularly buggy code releases where it was enough to make me consider quitting the program. Even though the money was still good it's just getting the page is annoying because you never know when it's going to come.
At the beginning of this year management decided to remove the monetary incentive for being first level on call and the two of us who are in the first level on call position when we were on the call and they informed us that the incentive program is going away both of us told them at that moment we were quitting from the voluntary on call program.
So now the on call rotation is management does all first level on calls and second level on call is engineering team specific as before. It is quite a bit more annoying for the engineering teams now because as you can imagine Management's first level on call solve rate is 0% and so second level is always paged out.
I would say that if your company is adding in a new program compensation of some sort should be a part of it. Because if you were hired into a company that had an existing on-call program and you were joining a team where you were expected to be in the on-call rotation you would, hopefully, negotiate your total compensation package to account for that. Generally getting comp time for after hours on call work is insufficient. Because the nature of on-call is that it is unknown when it is coming and how long it will be and will it actually allow you to push your project deadlines out? Most of the time if you're a salaried worker being required to be part of an on-call rotation where you are required to work when directed pushes you out of what could be considered an exempt employee. If you have input into the compensation I would recommend tracking on call hours and getting paid overtime for them. Companies don't like that cuz they feel like they're paying out money when they may not have to but I think it's a reasonable compromise. You get paid for the additional time worked in addition to your normal hours and you are still giving up a certain amount of freedom and autonomy for whatever the rotation schedule is where you need to be able to respond. And giving up that autonomy is kind of a sacrifice for you because you can't plan to be out with friends all night or other such things if you know you may get a call and have to respond. You literally become tethered to a working environment for a week or whatever the on-call shift is. So both sides take some risk. And the monetary compensation and tracking of hours for the company they should consider that a good thing because if on call becomes a major expense that dictates there are other problems in your product. And that is a management problem that needs to be seen and tracked and have a cost on the balance sheet so it will be corrected. Costs unknown are costs uncontrolled and if they can lay them on to an employee where they can claim ignorance all it does is cause burnout and makes good people leave.
That vacation is not eligible for pay out if I resigned.
