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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: 3, Insightful) by Marco2G on Thursday December 10 2015, @09:11AM
That 250 a week is compensation for you to be willing to be on call at all. And by on call I mean best effort. You try to make sure you have network coverage. Also on call means taking the problem, not solving it. It means calling a colleague and have him fix it if you're away from any computer.
If you only have one colleague, it sounds to me as if your company is trying to get a 24/7 support going. Dude, even a somewhat reliable 9-5 support takes three people!
The solving part of this is top be compensated extra on an hourly basis.
Anything less than that and you're being taken advantage of. In that case it's up to you to weigh your options: Is your existence so dependent on this job that you will do this no matter what (in which case you set yet another precedent for workers all over getting screwed a bit more every year) or will you demand proper compensation or even look for another job?
This is up to you to decide. Fact remains you're a work slave, though.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 10 2015, @11:28AM
Yeah they are screwing the OP.
My on call is one week out of four. In four years I have only had calls on Sunday once, and knew it was coming because of how Saturday went.
I have missed plenty of calls, it rolls to my boss who is always backup to on call. He will give you a call to make sure everything is ok but no trouble for missing calls.
Typical number of calls a week is less then 1 and that one is typically a password unlock or something banal. Unless something has caused a work stoppage, it gets put on the backburner till morning or Monday.
Whats that, your check printer is acting up again. Use the one in accounting till Monday.
I do get a pittance for oncall pay, but hey they pay for my cell and it usually results in only one call or so every month to unlock/reset passwords.
(Score: 3, Funny) by kurenai.tsubasa on Thursday December 10 2015, @03:17PM
Here, I'll throw out this tip. If you don't want to respond to a page, don't. Do you have an answering service or call center that's actually paging you?
Blame the fuck out of them. Claim you never got the page. It always works.
The trick is you have to go full Trump about it. When the answering service shows evidence that they did page you, double down on your story that you never received the page. Make up other times that this happened as well. Always blame the answering service to the point you convince your employer to find a new answering service.
I know because I'm the jerk at the call center that provides the proof, which is never believed, is never good enough, that the page did go out.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Thursday December 10 2015, @07:03PM
I know because I'm the jerk at the call center that provides the proof, which is never believed, is never good enough, that the page did go out.
A lot of pagers are still unidirectional (one of the reasons to use SMS over a pager is that you get the acknowledgement back). It doesn't matter if you can prove that a signal was sent, there's still no guarantee that it was received.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by kurenai.tsubasa on Saturday December 12 2015, @02:39PM
That was my theory many moons ago. Just about everybody's switched away from those things to SMS. There are still a few beepers and alpha pagers floating around.
In any case, my one weird old trick still works with SMS. Just claim it was never received. Remember to delete the SMS from your phone's history/log/whatsapp/whatever for maximum effect!
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Friday December 11 2015, @05:29PM
Hah, yeah that's basically what I do, although being on call isn't actually in my contract and I don't have a pager. It was more of a "We're moving you to the testing team, give us your personal cell phone number because you're now expected to be available by phone 24/7" to which my response is "Oh, sorry, my phone was on silent and in the other room charging. Yes, every time you've called for the past year."
The way I see it, if they're not paying for it then it's not part of your job. If you choose to do it, it's a personal favor. You should give them as many of those as they give you.