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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: 0, Troll) by wisnoskij on Thursday December 10 2015, @12:42PM
I think you should stop complaining. In reality you would not be driving out of state and climbing mountains 100% of your off work hours. In reality you would probably be sitting on your couch at home even more often then you do now if you have all of your off work hours free. Not being able to leave the city limits for half your off hours is really not objectively going to hamper you.
What I would consider billing is expenses. If you have to drive back into work, if you have to pay for a meal you did not get to eat, they should pay for that. And you should get paid time, plus some multiplier, for your time.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 10 2015, @02:01PM
Spoken like someone who has never been on call.
The requirement to be instantly available has all kinds of deleterious effects on your life. You can't commit to anything because you may have to get up and leave at any moment. Want to go on a date? Go ahead, but your date isn't going to be happy when you have to leave in the middle of dinner. Single parent? Gotta have someone who can babysit at a moment's notice. Divorced parent? Can't even get your kids for that weekend lest your spouse sues to reduce your access rights since you left the kids with a babysitter instead of spending the time with them.
That shit wears you down really fast. Some of it no amount of money can compensate for. But when money can compensate it needs to be proportional. Only fools work for free.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by xav on Thursday December 10 2015, @02:50PM
Spoken like someone who has never been on call.
No, spoken like someone who employs on-call workers.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday December 11 2015, @01:38AM
The requirement to be instantly available
This is the confusion that has not been defined.
There's "instantly able to talk/advise" and "instantly available to begin work" and "instantly fix problems"
I'm no jerk; I've been on call for more than a quarter century one place or another and if someone wants to talk about my next work assignment, whenever it begins, I'm down with it. Brainstorm things. Advise about isolation of a problem. Basically if its just talking, I really don't mind. I kinda like work, at least in moderation, if you got something interesting to talk about, sure, what the heck, as long as you don't make a habit of it. Sometimes IRL I'm even bored, sure I'll talk to you while in the grocery store line, what else was I gonna do?
Instantly available to begin work is utterly insane unless you're accepting significant cash or comp time or compensation in general. This fits in with attitude. Where I work now they're all "cub scout motto" which for the uncivilized savages in the audience or, I suppose, girls, is "do your best". So I'm at dinner, theater, concert, drunk or otherwise chemically enhanced, in the middle of nowhere on a hiking trail, at doctor/dentist, well OK "do your best" next chance you get. I'm cool with that. I get home eventually and very first thing I do is boot the laptop and get to work. Sometimes I've walked out of boring scenes "because I gotta do dis for work" but it was voluntary.
Instantly fix problems is insanity. If your job is so micromanaged that they tell you how long it will take you to poop and you will be counseled if you take too long, you gotta get the hell out of there, they're about to replace you with a very small shell script or a robot arm. Because that's not my situation, if they F-ed me over, which they don't, I operate at a technical level way beyond mgmt, so that 5 minute problem would get billed as an 8 hour callout and they'd never know the difference other than owing me about 11 hours and 55 minutes of comp time. Go ahead, piss me off, I'm not even talking about utter sandbagging like pretending to work while sitting in the little league baseball stadium, I'm talking about how about we FSCK a couple dozen terabytes while I cool down. How do you know we don't need to FSCK the array? Clearly the database indexes need rebuilding, that'll be at least ten or so hours. Oh I know the perfect solution to the problem, I need to coordinate with your bosses coworker to make some config changes and we both know he's antelope hunting for the next six weeks, till then you can pound sand.
My current employer respects me; I respect them back. If that stopped on either side, well, things would get real, thats for sure.
This is what I don't understand about OP's 15 minute requirement. 15 minutes, sure. You want to piss me off, go ahead. I'll "respond" in 15 minutes and then spend an hour mowing the lawn because I'm pissed off, then maybe I'll start ACTUALLY working as opposed to getting paid to work or maybe I'll watch a Star Trek episode to cool down. Or maybe a couple episodes of "full metal alchemist". Or some pr0n. Then maybe I'll start actually working. This isn't a problem for me personally because I've had toxic bosses but never this bad, and the current mgmt is actually decent. But if they want war, they would be bringing a knife to a thermonuclear war.