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Hey Soylentils,
One of my least favorite parts of my job is on call work. I'm wondering if there are any standard practices when it comes to afterhour on call work. At the moment, I am on call 50% of the time. (I share it with one other person). When I am on call, I am expected to answer the ticket within 15 minutes, which means:
- I can't leave the city
- Going to a restaurant/movie/etc is a gamble.
- Sometimes I have to drop whatever I'm doing and answer a call.
Thankfully, I don't get many calls -- Maybe one per week that I can resolve in 30 minutes. In exchange for carrying the pager, I am paid a flat rate of $250CAD/week. After taxes, it works out to more like $150. I am sick to death of carrying the pager. I hate being restricted in my movements on my time off. I like to get out to the mountains, and because of pager, I can't.
Now, there are rumors that the company might remove that $250/week because of "the economic times". That basically would mean that I am giving up my freedom 50% of the time for nothing, and that I should be happy to have a job. Needless to say, I'm a little upset at that prospect...
So, Soylentils, what are your pager practices? Do you get paid for on call work? What happens if you miss a call? Do you have a backup on-call person? Do you get time off in lieu?
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 10 2015, @08:07AM
Hi,
I used to be on-call duty for incident response at the biggest local ISP, being on the team maintaining a number of different platforms (email, web, IPTV, etc.). We were 6 people rotating through 1-week on-call spells, where everybody maybe had one call every two rotations (i.e. 1 call / 2 weeks). We had to be able to pick up the phone within an hour, with no specific response time for solving an issue (if any, it was about starting to look at it). Obviously, with the types of platforms we were managing, we were supposed to have minimal downtimes, but didn't have explicit SLAs. Thanks to redundancy, incidents were usually only about loss of redundance, real outages were very seldom.
We got paid a certain amount for that week of on-call duty (higher that what you're quoting, but then pay levels here are relatively high, as are costs of living), and could bill hours in case we got called - standard overtime charges.
I have to say I was pretty happy to get out of that duty when I changed employers, I certainly wouldn't have accepted doing on-call every two weeks. One week per month may be acceptable, more is just way too much an imposition on private life, whatever you're paid.
Btw, to take calls from business customers and constant monitoring of alerts, we had a specific team working shifts, so no on-call duty there. They were the ones to call us (3rd-level support).