44
votes
How can I get my engineers to accept being on call?
Link information
This data is scraped automatically and may be incorrect.
- Authors
- ogpk545, Flater, solarflare, PeteCon, Xavier J, spickermann, Sembei Norimaki, fgysin, Mookuh, csstudent1418, MonkeyZeus, keshlam, Steve, computercarguy, Emilio M Bumachar, Thomas Koelle, Rohit Gupta
- Published
- Oct 2 2023
- Word count
- 526 words
They've literally already been given the answer, compensation needs to be adjusted if the terms of employment are going to be changed on a whim. Either that or hire new engineers who are aware of the on-call requirements prior to being hired (and as such are able to accurately negotiate compensation) once the current ones rightly find new employment.
The absolute inhumanity of this makes me despise the OP, so obviously that I'm thinking this may just be rage-bait. After all who goes to stackexchange for business/HR/management related questions when they've never posted before on the site?
Regardless, we see this sort of attitude from managers often enough in real life that a little discussion can't hurt.
Sounds like they don’t have the agency for that as a line manager. And they said the other solution - PIP them and then you have headcount cleared up to hire someone else.
Practically you are correct, that is necessary sometimes, but that crassness toward firing or forcing out real people from their job over the whims of a CTO is exactly the dehumanization I'm talking about. Not to mention the morality of putting someone on something called a "performance improvement plan" when their performance has not changed whatsoever.
I understand it's an effective form of management in a corporation that truly just needs massive amounts of standardized labor, but it completely undersells the strengths an individual brings to a team, the institutional knowledge and relationships that would be lost, effect on morale, company culture, retention, etc. If you're not a massive company that already has high turnover it's a terrible business decision. There's no way it's a cost benefit to go through that much on-boarding and off-boarding when an on-call policy has apparently never been implemented before, and as such can't possibly have enough ROI to justify replacing engineers over. There are other solutions here that don't involve taking away people's livelihoods willy-nilly or invading their personal time without compensation.
The mindset in the original post and their situation reeks of someone trying to force corporate management strategies onto a smaller business or more humanistic environment. Those policies, values, and expectations are not the same and people know this when choosing somewhere to work. Changing that without notice or a compensation change is an unethical bait-and-switch and ineffective.
Im sure you know but a “performance improvement plan“
Is just code for “we want to fire you so we will start gathering evidence against you”
Ive seen people pip’ed, set an impossible task and then when it is not met after 6 weeks then they are fired, from the standpoint of HR thats all they need.
That said, we had a person on my team out on a PIP 4 years into employment. The rest of the team came up of a list of things we would expect someone 1 year into the job to do with relatively little guidance.
6 months in and they had not made one tiny bit of improvement in this regard. They would have just had to show some progress and all would have been well.
Interesting but it really makes me wonder what their skill/growth is if they've been around for 4 years before all this occurred. Are employees expected to be X% more efficient per year on the tech stack? are they expected to start seeking promotions or management after X years? Did management change and expectations/reponsibilities rose without compensation nor title increases?
I think either way, a PIP is a sign to start seeking new employment. Even if they were a truly bad employee it shows they don't have the right fit in the company.
I worked for a company that had a PIP process and saw it weaponized during the pandemic. Typically for this company the established percentage to be PIPed is published months ahead of time, but this number became hidden once an economic downturn began. It was later determined that the previously established percentage was upped to help encourage a "quiet layoff" so the company didn't have to pay put severance to those who would have normally been laid-off in this situation. It was also encouraged to review employees negatively for "team player" scoring if they were not showing up in-person during the height of the pandemic.
Ever since I saw that unfold and higher-ups dodge questions in open forums regarding it, it's something I attempt to avoid now when looking for work. It's just another tool HR and business leaders can manipulate to fire whoever they want.
It’s the reverse, the only reason PIP exists is because business leaders made rules to prevent line managers from firing people arbitrarily. Otherwise, in the US anyone can be fired for any reason, minus protected characteristics, you don’t need a tool. PIPs exist to get around internal processes for firing people.
if they gave severance to fired people, there wouldn't be much issue.. Many would happily take 3 months pay to get out of a place if they aren't strongly invested.
it's to get around paying severance, because even a PIP'd employee in that same time span can get some work done out of them.
Putting someone on a PIP doesn't absolve the company from paying severance, though, does it? I mean, I guess no company has to pay severance. It's usually done to buy a signature on a contract that says that the employee won't sue them.
Our company hardly does PIPs, and instead uses layoffs to target underperforming employees.
Depends on the jurisdiction. The only way to get out of paying some form of severance in many EU countries is to have evidence that it's for cause (e.g. gross negligence, or theft), or to shut down the entire business.
In the US usually you are offered a severance if you agree to resign, not if you actually go through with the PIP.
@devilized I know that in the USA the Fair Labor Standards Act has no language about requiring severance whatsoever; it has just become a standard practice in many industries to maintain goodwill towards employees.
A PIP if not followed can give cause to firing meaning that the individual would no longer be eligible for unemployment pay.
Since most states in the USA are financially responsible for paying unemployment in one way or another they use PIPs as a way to show "yes, we have cause for firing this individual" and depending on the state (with a few exceptions) their UI taxes rate doesn't increase or their UI pool remains untapped.
Having worked as a manager in a start up with no HR team initially and having to let someone go for being super aggressive towards a team lead they were able to make the case they were fired without cause.
Once we hired a HR team I was told in no uncertain terms that we have these in place to document cause to fire someone and no re liable for unemployment for the individual.
While @stu2b50 mentioned that PIPs are in place so folks aren't just fired by different managers; for the USA specifically I can't find any language that states that these are required.
@ignorabimus - do you have the original recruiting post for this job? Does it state on call time? Does the job description that the employee signed have language for on call? If any of these are true I do think a PIP is the best way to go. As they are ultimately responsible for reading their job description when they signed it.
My personal management style is to ensure that any PIP is SMART and really focus on it being measurable, achievable, and realistic. Depending on the on call volume I would say "ensuring all on call requests are addressed within 30 minutes of ticket creation unless otherwise occupied by a different on call ticket."
Now if there was no language in the recruitment or job description about on call time and you're actively changing it to include that I do believe the engineer should be appropriately compensated for these changes.
Almost every job description or employment contract nowadays will include some weaselly language like 'and any other tasks as required' to cover their asses when they want to change anything on a whim.
OP, if they’re real, is just a line manager in the end. What their CTO is trying to do is probably foolish, but sometimes you have shitty CTOs. Not much you can do about it. Since OP says they probably can’t get raises authorized, then their employees can either just deal with, leave, or get kicked out. Those are the options.
It would be a shitty situation to be in, sure, but that’s not an actionable statement. Sometimes things are shitty. Best thing to do would be to let the employees know they’ll be PIPd (which is essentially just a euphemism for being fired at this point) as early as possible so they can start job hunting earlier.
IMO, this here is a pretty compelling reason to have workers have a significant vote in the hiring and firing of management.
I'd rather be fired outright than put on a PIP when performance clearly isn't needed to be improved. I'd have more respect if the Line Manager simply said "do we give him an ultimatim?"
But of course it really depends on the country of the employer and employee. That may in fact be illegal (in which case, good. I wish the US was like that).
I’d rather be put on a PIP - there’s not really a benefit to being outright fired. If nothing else you can phone it in and start leetcoding and applying to other companies while still getting checks. Usually the alternative is resigning with severance, otherwise no one would prefer leaving early.
It’s also usually not something a line manager has control over. The process to terminate employees is determined by HR. PIP in many companies is the only actual path to termination so it’s synonymous with your ultimatum.
financially, no. it happens more suddenly and gives me less time to look for a job. So I get that. But the upside for me is stress. If I'm simply let go over such a change, I don't need to question my abilities nor work extra hard hoping "well I can improve and they'll keep me". That self-doubt is more damaging than any firing for me these days.. I keep a savings buffer for that exact reason.
Ethically, yes. They make it clear they need something else and they don't want to pay me more for the increased responsibility. It's honest, even if it's still a dick move. But I prefer that frank honesty over all the hoops jumped through to make it look "formal".
That's why I don't take my 2nd layoff this year as bad as the firsts. 2nd layoff, "publisher funding has changed so we need to downsize". 1st layoff, "uhh, your role is terminated. billion dollar company needs to show better earnings call".
Yes, and that is what I have a problem with. PIP should be used as, well, "performance improvement plans". when you genuinely want an employee to remain on a team but their performance is slightly below par. But as is, the barrel is beyond poisoned so it's seen as a soft layoff. You can't even question if your performance was truly under par for the reasons that question shows.
Companies do this because they don't want to have a potentially angry employee around who is on a timer. Even though they also expect an employee to give their 2 weeks if they leave on their own terms. .
Not really. It’s more of a policy meant to protect ICs from rogue line managers that has become twisted into something else over the years. In the US, employment is by default at will - if they simply don’t want the employee “on a timer” and potentially liable to sabotage, all they need to do is terminate them on the spot. Most of the “mass” layoffs in tech earlier this year were done this way (with severance).
PIP doesn’t need to exist for any legal reason. Corporate HR has policies around trying to avoid rogue line managers acting on vendettas. They evidently don’t try all that hard, but HR is the only party that a PIP is trying to appease.
I suppose it’s just about how much experience you have with the lingo of the industry. I don’t think anything of a PIP or anyone put on a PIP other than that their line manager wanted to fire them. Either way, it’s likely the only path the hypothetical OP in the stack exchange post had for a termination.
it could be both. I also didn't mention how PiPs usually include strict paperwork and can be used as a CYA around what may in fact be disciminatorily driven firings, but I'd hope everyone here would agree that that is truly scummy. they don't "need" to exist, but they offer leverage if an employee ever decides to raise a legal case. "But we tried all we could and offered this specific plan" is why they exist and employers don't simply throw out employees.
My only sympathy in the above situation is that this is on the whims of the CTO. They could easily offer this ultimatim themselves but it's much more "legal" to have the line manager administer the process instead.
It is indeed experience. I have heard thirdhand accounts of employees surviving PiPs. I have never seen it secondhand. By that point the employee left before any termination. I've even heard of one who quit on the spot when hearing such discussions were in-place (But to be fair, that employee already had another offer on hand. It just changed their mind on giving in a 2 weeks notice).
So yea, never heard a case where a PiP improved performance. May as well just call it "probation" and skip the flowers.
It’s quite possibly out of their hands (if real at all), but the fact they chose to jump to “how do I force this to happen? Should I just go straight to the unethical and possibly illegal option?” rather than “does anyone have suggestions around dealing with the impossible position I have been placed in by upper management?” doesn’t suggest they’re prioritising the employee’s needs or rights even within the bounds of whatever power they do have.
Not that I agree with the OP, but do these jobs not include the 'other duties as assigned' verbiage that I've seen nearly universally across basically every class of job from burger flipper on up? Everywhere I've worked, and everywhere my family members and friends with whom I've discussed these things with (both blue and white collar, professional and not) has had that listed as a job requirement, and pointed to that whenever anyone made a stink about new duties like an on-call rotation. Hell, my mother (a 20+ year social services director at a nursing home company) is going through this right now with her job re: being required to push a crappy insurance plan on residents and families that, by her own admission, is worse in every way for the residents save one in the facility she oversees, with her ED using the 'you agreed to do other duties as assigned when you were hired' line and threatening writeups if her and the other staff don't start pushing these harder. Never mind that she has a duty of care to her residents, and is just presenting it as 'here's this plan's coverage, and these are the care needs for you/your family member at our facility, it's your decision'.
It's stupid and frustrating to be sure, but I'd be honestly shocked if any role did not have that listed amongst the requirements specifically to counteract complaints like the engineer here.
In my opinion at that point you really have to ask yourself what practical value there is in any sort of agreement where one party can unilaterally add any terms they like at any time with no penalties.
As you said almost every single employment agreement includes such clauses, and as employment is required to exist in society, employees really have no agency in the situation but to agree to those terms. Our incredibly flawed laws may not practically reflect that at all (even if the core of contract law says otherwise), but the values and ideas behind any sort of agreement or contract put that firmly into the same sort of useless unenforceable category we see all the time with TOS agreements.
The problem is, at least in the US, that the clause is enforceable, especially re: unemployment and being denied due to termination for cause.
It's gross and shouldn't be enforceable, but here we are.
At least for wide swaths of Europe I can say that such a catch all term would be deemed void in front of a court. That said, suing your employer is usually something you do after you quit or are resigned to having to do that anyway, and it actually requires you to know your rights, so many such unenforceable clauses (not allowed to disclose your salary is another popular one) regularly end up in employment contracts.
Beyond that, even if the clause as a whole weren’t voided, on call work is a material alteration of the terms of the contract. Changing working hours isn’t comparable to changing duties within those hours, and there are whole swathes of law about what’s acceptable there.
I can see “additional duties” wording holding up as an alternative to painstakingly enumerating every possible task a job might ever require - it’s arguably necessary because a reasonable contract does need to account for potential unknowns - but if one party is making the “it’s only reasonable” argument the courts will sure as hell ensure that same standard is applied to the other party’s claim.
Asked to write some internal docs for the sales team or sit in on some client meetings despite being hired for a development job? Probably reasonable, as long as it’s only occasional - that’s a fair expectation of the person who knows most about the software they wrote. Asked to take on significant extra core working hours? No chance that’s covered.
The problem is, at least here in the US, is that it's rare to have employment contracts at all. Outside of government employees, contractors, and people in the state of Montana, we are all at will employees. I've never seen a W2 job outside of those aformentioned scenarios not have verbiage staring that "this is not an employment contract" when receiving a job offer to sign.
I have a friend and former roommate whose job description explicitly included fully open availability (as an IT guy for a middling construction company) explicitly so that if they need to call someone in at 2am due to whatever crisis, anyone who says no can be terminated and be ineligible for unemployment. If these engineers for the OP situation's job descriptions didn't include defined hours of availability, odds are, at least in my US experience, they would be seen as terminating for cause for refusing to go on-call.
I'm no labor lawyer, obviously, and a court fight may well result in the worker winning, but there's also the spectre of binding arbitration agreements that preclude taking these things to court, which thanks to our lovely Supreme Court, are spreading like weeds amongst companies for both their employees and customers.
We have very few rights as workers here, at all levels.
I work at a scale-up UK 3pl (3rd party logistics) as a software developer. Last (and apparently every) Xmas they empty the office - requiring all dev, test, sales, and marketing staff to get to the warehouses to meet peak demand for picking and packing.
Last year 1 dev quit on the spot. Some developed "health issues" that precluded warehouse work after a few days of it.
I investigated and it seemed like they could demand this of us. Fairly standard employment contracts provide for this flexibility (though tbf specifically within contractual hours).
The main thing that surprised/surprises me (they're planning to request the same this year but the ship is sinking and I'll be long gone) is that it seems woefully inefficient. The lead developer building boxes for a week must be the highest paid person doing that task on the planet, right?
If that was during normal hours and wasn’t some Amazon sweatshop scenario I’d actually be really happy to make the same pay but mix it up doing a new job for a week.
There are more and less interesting jobs in the context of the warehouse. Me.... I became box-builder-boy. It's who I was. Who I always had been. Like my father, and his father before him. My children would be born into boxes I'd built, and I would eventually go into one when my
boxwatch was over.I built a lot of boxes. It really wasn't for me.
I used to work on a commercial farm, and we occasionally had these all-hands-on-deck days (usually harvesting crops or something similar), which pulled in the office staff. But for us, this was much better received, I think for a few reasons:
What kind of crops were y’all harvesting?
It was a vegetable seed farm, so it varied: the seeds of tomato, lettuce, cabbage, carrot, spinach, cucumber, etc. There is a lot more physical labor associated with seed farms than with more typical farms because you have tons and tons of different crops, and each crop is often very small — usually too small to be serviced by a tractor.
On many of these really busy days, though, we weren't actually harvesting seeds; we were digging selected vegetable plants out of the ground, potting them up, and putting them in greenhouses where they would be selectively bred into new varieties.
That’s a really interesting one! If it’s literally only a week then maybe the overhead of hiring temp workers and the cash flow implications of paying them on top of the office salaries could justify it financially, I guess? But then if they’re looking at it as a nuanced question around opportunity cost and productivity, it seems mad to ignore the morale implications and the implicit cost there.
Would be fascinating to see what the legal line would be in terms of duration, as well. Seems like one week of the year could reasonably be justified as an additional duty (although it definitely doesn’t overrule the various health and safety questions that could make the whole thing moot anyway), but what about two, or four, or six? There’s got to be a point that it crosses into “not the contracted job at all” rather than “technically legal but bad idea”.
Hah, it might be valid fiscal choice, but judging by the folks at the helm.... I wouldn't count on it. I guess it's peak in a lot of industries so temp workers are likely at a premium right then and there.
You're not wrong, it raises some interesting points about what your obliged to do outside of the specific contract.... Can a boss demand you bring them coffee? Set up new folks' desks? Maitre d' a stakeholder even in-hours? I dunno, I'd be curious to learn more.
In general, the more vauge the langauage, the harder it is to enforce. That may be there and they can try to leverage it, but it'd be shaky grounds if it escalated to a lawsuit. "Other duties as assigned" may not be very enforcable if the duty is "work on-call on Saturday" and the other part of the contract says "expected working hours are M-F 9-18".
but outside of legalities, it's also a matter of trust, and this just erodes more and more away at employee trust. if you require skilled labor, this is kryptonite to a business long term.
Being "on call" is worse than not being able to ever be on vacation.
For my first project in the current company, the was the need for an on-call rotation.
Management said they were organising it but if the first couple of weeks someone from the project could cover for it.
I did one week.
One week in which:
And so on. Everything for something like 200£ extra.
When the proper on-rota was established we were asked if we wanted to be part of it and I explained that that amount was barely enough to justify being on call for one day. Certainly not a week.
The manager told me "ah, but most of the time nothing happens".
I answered: "Yeah, that's even worse."
I'm in an "on call" rotation that's much more perfunctory than this. I basically just am supposed to keep an eye on error notifications in a slack channel and escalate it to someone who actually knows wtf is up if necessary, and our team is the right size and spread over timezones enough that I'm able to step out if needed and turn it off in the evening without worrying too much. Even this is still pretty draining, having to juggle an entire extra set of tasks and respond to constant pings distracting me throughout the workday. The idea that a workplace thinks it's okay not to pay extra for actual on call is insane to me.
Yea strangely being oncall felt less bad if you were pretty sure you'd get called once a day. It made you feel useful and made it easier to explain 'this is why you pay me.'
After fixing all those problems, the phone might ring once every other rotation. And it means you either get lax or you end up on high alert over nothing.
Huh. When I’ve been on call it’s not nearly that bad. More like I’m the default person to be asked when something goes down (we’d have automatic Slack alerts). I could go places, just probably not more than 20 minutes away from a computer. And if I was away I could do an @everyone in Slack to see if somebody else could get it.
Honestly, being on call means you can't be on vacation. You can't make any plans with extended family, or friends, so the "off-time" is significantly lower quality.
Best solution I can think of is to pay them at least half their usual salary as a base rule.
Half? I say full even more so if they want a response time from 15 minutes. You can't do anything in that time other than being near a PC to fix things.
For places where overtime pay still exists, base + half tends to be the typical rate for overtime, weekend, or holiday work. I think that's where it comes from.
On-call is soft overtime that may or may not be used, so half makes sense unless you are being required more than 50% of the time.
If my job requires me to be available within 20 minutes (which means I can't do anything outside the house), that means I need to be available 100% of the time, so they'd better pay me at least 100% of my salary. And since I'm losing free time, I'd ask a compensation on top of it.
Really? For my guys it just means having your laptop within an hours drive (and internet I guess). So it makes it hard to go scuba diving or camping maybe. But we have fallbacks set if they do so it's really only a problem if three of them go scuba diving simultaneously.
I think the "post and run away" nature of this discussion indicates that it's probably ragebait. Especially the "let's PIP that engineer" portion.
At the same time, I've been in a similar position as the manager in that team. Not quite in the "please introduce on call to a team that has contractually no responsibility to do so", but on a team that had an upfront oncall rotation but staff cuts had changed that from a 1 in 10 week occurence for the typical engineer to more frequent. The nature of the system is that it dealt with actively hostile and changing user input so a lot of issues were not the kind of routine "here's what you do if the disk usage alert goes off" kind that you could write steps for dealing with into an operations manual and so usually required some subject matter expertise to deal with which in the company culture meant escalation to developers on call.
This system was maintained by two teams of developers. Mine in a medium expense site, and a SF team which was much more expensive. It was also clear that leadership did not see the system as an investment area (yet at the same time saw the continued operation of its current functions as business critical) so over time a combination of not backfilling departing engineers and losing an engineer here or there in layoff waves had left the team much less staffed than its historical peak when the system was being newly built.
Anyway, the company got new owners who went for more severe job cuts. As part of this, the entire team in SF was to be cut. Myself and the lead for the SF team were, not officially told as such, but given the information to join the dots that this was being discussed by our shared manager in advance.
I did make it clear that without the numbers provided by the SF team, we would not be able to have developer on call at all times (especially as the plan was to cut without replacement). In particular, there are legal requirements around working hours and how oncall contributes to that that meant that to replicate the availability provided by the two teams combined with just the team in my location would have required flat out illegal levels of oncall (in the "doesn't matter what you signed, that is unenforceable" kind of illegal). I made the case that 24/7 developer support is not going to be possible at the new staffing level and unlike the manager in this story, held my ground on it.
Anyway, they did cut the SF team in the end so our oncall cover did have gaps in it, much to the annoyance of certain SVPs, but to me at least it was important that they felt the consequences of their decisions and not to paper over it by overworking the team until others started to quit. I did ultimately leave that company some months later, because a lot of the other cost cutting decisions by the new owners left me concerned with them, but I do talk to my successor from time to time and he has also so far maintained the same policy as me the last time we spoke.
I'll always keep that in mind with any non-verified post, but for what it's worth: it's not a completely new account, even if this is the only time they asked a question with such an account. So it's very slightly above an anonymous burner account.
Glad they felt it. if they are going to cut a "business critical" operation trying to save money, it's going to cost them. So many companies seem to forget that they employ people because at the end of the day, the value they generate is more than their raw salary + benefits. So it should be no shock that you lose that value and more when you let them go.
My company has an on call rotation, luckily I'm not a part of that, being the only Android engineer, it's almost like I'm on call all the time anyways lol. I agree with a lot of the comments, if you'd ever want me formally on call, pay me more. That's basically it.
Exactly, it's honestly only just flavors of ridiculous to consider other "solutions".
I've seen this before, it's common on Quora. People post things in order to see how others react, they're almost always fake. It sounds like a naive business manager trying to manipulate employees and get around what the employee demanded like some kind of corporate goon, it just screams rage bait. I'm impressed by the comments to it.
The obvious answer is give in to their demands or expect to hire new people willing to do the job that way. It should not be to manipulate employees into allowing their working conditions to deteriorate to the point they can't even have time away from work and without any added compensation to boot. That's the thinking of a terrible employer that I would hope goes under or at least has a costly "present" left in the system by one of the departing engineers.
The people commenting on that stack exchange seem a little too incredulous at the idea of being on call as a software engineer when it’s common practice. Usually a week rotation, with the rotation being however large your team is. SLAs depend on how critical the service is. Some more strenuous on calls have follow the sun rotations, but many don’t.
Springing it up on someone is pretty abrupt, and if the manager isn’t approved to give raises or bonuses for it, then they should expect attrition. But it seems like the OP on that thread was OK with that.
I mean in the end it is what it is.
I think the incredulity is more related to it being sprung on the engineer after explicitly being told there is no oncall. That’s something I’d take into account during an interview to weigh against my compensation. If we’re assuming a 1-week oncall 4 times a year, that’s an additional 512 hours of being “at work” for the year (20 weekdays * 16 hours + 8 weekends * 24 hours). While you’re not actively “doing work” for the company during these shifts, you are sacrificing agency of your time for your job and expected to hop on your laptop within 15-30 minutes (or whatever SLA).
If you were to get half-pay for the oncall shift, which seems fair to me (salaried staff may not see this explicitly but it’s built into their salary given job responsibilities), this equates to more than a 10% increase in pay. That’s right on the line for what I’d consider worth it.
I say this all as someone with oncall responsibilities. It was absolutely one of the greater points I considered with my offer since it can have such a dramatic impact on WLB, especially if the team gets really small. I would not have taken this job if I had a similarly paying offer without oncall.
I think that's the exact problem. It may be "built-in", but to suddenly have it hoisted on your doesn't feel good. And as you calculated, that is 25% more working hours to be thrown at you.
And of course this is on top of general overtime. It's not uncommon for a salaried employee to put in 60+ hours, or essentially work 50% more than a full tiem job without any additional compensation. To have on-call work at that makes you question why you aren't working somewhere else that doesn't require 70% of your life.
It’s not that uncommon. Reorgs can happen quite often, and you go from a team without oncall to a team with oncall. At which point you can argue for a raise by threatening to leave, but if you won’t get it, you just need to leave.
You mean "you're just being fired", right? In my book, retroactively and unilaterally changing the terms of an employment contract is equivalent to dismissal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructive_dismissal
In my jurisdiction if a job description change because of an reorg and the employee doesnt agree to the change then they will be let go because the old job no longer exists.
The difference between being fired and let go is important as it can impact severance and unemployment pay.
If you are fired then you most likely wont get severance, if you are let go because of "lack of work" then you probably will get severance. And if you leave voluntarily then you have to wait xx days before being eligibly for unemployment pay, if you are let go or fired then you are eligible right away.
Well, sure, you will be fired if you don’t comply. If you consider it being fired when they change the job, then that’s works, if not the orthodox definition of being “fired”.
Either way, you and the company are no longer compatible in what you want and what they want so somehow or another you will no longer work for them.
Just a heads up that there's no location given in the post. I'm reasonably convinced that under my local (german) laws, the employer has no actual tools to fire me. Perhaps that further informs me viewing the employer's change of the employment contract as dismissal. I'm of course aware that the US operates under "old west" employment law, and "I don't like your face" is often sufficient reason to remove people's livelihoods. /s
In any case, it is entirely on the employer to negotiate a reasonable solution here. Extra work for no extra pay is not usually a reasonable bargaining position.
After working for a university and seeing the relaxed approach taken there, I've come to the conclusion that most on-call requirements are a bunch of crap. Most applications are internal applications only used during normal business hours and are not used around the globe, so you can easily get away with a simple business hours support rotation. It's largely cargo culting around "well FAANGs have armies of on-calls, so our <10k DAU app needs them, too!"
My team maintains systems that power a lot of business applications, but we have no on-call. Any outages outside 8-5 CST are not our problem, and depending on who's doing support this sprint (we have some people on the west coast), you shouldn't expect much before 11 AM. We can work late if we want to and then leave early the following days, but realistically, unless it's something major like course registration is about to open, we log off whenever we want and just leave the rest for tomorrow.
I think more teams need to take a similar approach. If your app is just used by businesses in similar timezones, on-call is a whole lot of extra stress for very little business value.
I tend to agree. Formal on-call has it's purposes, but most of the time it can easily be replaced by regular formal support hours and a couple of trusted stakeholders who at least one of which can (statistically almost always) be reached in true emergencies (at their discretion).
I agree, and if your customers ask you for a non-business hours on call arrangement I think the correct answer (if you are in charge) is to say "yes, if you pay us a lot of money" (which really means "I don't want to do this, but if you pay me lots of money then why not") and give fair compensation (i.e. a good proportion of that money) to on-call employees.
The way you soften the blow for this is to pay them for oncall. This is what our company does - a flat rate for just being oncall/available, and an hourly rate for any after-hours or weekend time spent dealing with an issue. I remember when I started, I voluntarily took other people's oncall for the extra money to pay off my student loans.
I know the OP of that question said that they aren't given that ability, but it's foolish on behalf of the company. That extra oncall pay is likely less than the cost of having to onboard a new employee if even a single one of them quits over this issue. Penny-wise, pound-foolish.
Over here the standard usually is 50% hourly pay for being on-call. On-call requires you to be 15-30 minutes away from whatever you can use to fix issues, usually work laptop + internet connection. Oh and you need to be sober (...enough to answer the phone while sounding sober =)
As soon as something happens, you jump to regular overtime pay so if it's on a weekend+Sunday, you're making around 200-300% pay. If it's just after others logged off, you're getting normal pay, maybe 50% extra depending on the company.
I know a lot of people who have paid off loans just by hogging all the on-call hours they can. It's not especially hard if the playbooks are well made and nothing goes horribly wrong.
Asked like a true middle manager who has never been on call, or never had their employer try to change the terms of employment without re-negotiating said employment.
Just because we engineers are intelligent at our jobs does not make us exploitable. In fact, it should show that employers and middle managers should respect what we can do and make full use of the expertise with which we were hired. And if the terms don't specify on-call, then there should be no on-call.
Yeesh that's such a toxic question the whole way through.
From the adding a new requirement to the job with no compensation to the first reaction being to PIP the employee. So much to take issue with in such a short question.
@deimos Meta: we may need to adjust the author scraping when it comes to stack exchange websites:
I'm not quite sure if it was intentional or not to make every top level comment an "author" of this post, but it's an interesting situation to consider.