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What compensation will make you accept on-call without regrets?
Recent article How can I get my engineers to accept being on call? sparkled some discussion, so I was become very curious.
If you can choose between working without any on-call duties or working where every second/third day you will be 24h on-call, what compansetion will make you accept second options?
Im in my early middle ages, and personally, I think
x2 of my current compensation
will make me choose on-call without regrets. I'm quite enjoying my stress free hours outside of work, so quality of sleeping is not something that I can easily surrender.
Table stakes: decent salary, pay per hour on-call, and pay per callout. On-call isn't worth it if the company doesn't see that callouts cost them, but that brings me to what I actually see as essential before I'd be willing to do on-call again: serious commitments from the company to spend significant time and effort working on reliability and reducing how often callouts happen. Anything else is just paying staff to burn themselves out to save the company money.
Very few – if any – companies are actually willing to do that, which is why I avoid on-call jobs.
What is the definition of a callout? Is that when you get called when you're not on-call? or rather, while you're on call, are you expecting a sum when you get engaged plus your hourly on-call rate?
Yes. The previously I've seen 2+ hours of pay for picking up the phone.
It's an emergency line. If someone is 'just' calling for a password reset or to ask a yes/no question at 3 am they're still disrupting the life of the person they're calling. There should be only a little less reticence to call the on-call line than 911.
All of that is still dramatically cheaper than staffing an overnight shift. Which, if enough people are hitting the on-call line for the compensation to be a problem, you need an overnight shift.
The latter. The pay per hour on-call is pay for simply being availible, and the pay per callout is pay for doing work out of hours and the disruption that causes.
I've done 24/7 on-call before when working in IT, and again when I transitioned over to working in Data Recovery. All-hours data recovery emergencies were surprisingly frequent, and often incredibly time sensitive, with businesses potentially losing millions of dollars per day, so the compensation was pretty awesome. And maybe I'm weird, but I actually found it pretty fun and challenging too. However, even as enjoyable as I found it, I probably wouldn't do it again unless the compensation was ludicrous. I value my free time a lot more now than I did when I was young, and those kind of emergency jobs aren't quite as exciting anymore either. Seen one, seen 'em all by now. But for someone new to those fields it's a great way to rapidly get a huge amount of highly varied job experience though, so I would actually recommend considering it.
For a little while, on-call can be kind of fun for adrenaline junkies and compulsive problem-solvers (it me). It is educational to see how things can go wrong and build confidence in your own ability to work under pressure.
But it's far more engaging to root-cause recurring issues and drive stakes through their complicated vampiric hearts in the daylight, than it is to keep killing the same old monsters at times when you'd rather be having a life. Not to mention that it's better for your life expectancy to ditch those pulse-pounding 3 a.m. wakeup calls.
I'm a compulsive problem solver too, which is what drew me to those careers, and on-call work as well. But I hard disagree on solving the root cause being more engaging, since (at least in my fields) the root cause is more-often-than-not Executives severely undervaluing their IT infrastructure, employees, and refusing to listen to employee advice and recommendations. So it's typically a systemic / cultural issue, and trying to fix it is like beating your head against a brick wall to break through it. And I'd honestly rather just get paid to clean up the mess afterwards when the house of cards at someone else's business finally collapses. If the company execs there learn from their mistakes afterwards, good for them... but if not, more jobs and money for me down the line. :P
You're not wrong, and I once made the mistake of getting into management in part because I thought it might get those arguments listened to. 🤦
And yes, I now get consultant-level money for cleaning up those messes (customers can read the root-cause report and invest appropriately or not if they choose, but it's no longer my problem), and I have more control over my hours.
I've done on-call for a couple different IT jobs. Generally it wasn't too bad, but it only takes a few asinine calls to sour the experience. Nothing quite like getting called away from a Christmas-light tour with your family because someone's view setting in Outlook wasn't quite right, or getting woken up at 3:00 AM because the internet "feels a little slow" at a bar after closing.
I only ever got called at home for actual IT emergencies, like major system or hardware failures. And if anyone at our office was dumb/selfish enough to call me at home for anything that mundane I would have flat-out refused to help them, and my bosses probably would have reamed that person out for wasting my time. On-call was for legitimate emergencies only, not basic bullshit that could wait for normal office hours.
But if the company you work for lacks strict on-call policies, and your bosses suck at setting and reinforcing boundaries, I can see how on-call would be a bit of a nightmare. That was thankfully not the case anywhere I worked though.
I make >$100,000 and work <40 h a week, and not a second more. I love my job, but it would take an incredible amount of money to make me work more. Probably for 1.5x I could work like 45h, but that's about my max.
That's an excellent approach.
I'm way too old to have taken this long to realize that more pay won't give me an extra minute of life, and working too hard has certainly taken away more than a few.
I am lucky to be unionized, so it's unlikely to ever be a problem for me, but I understand it's not always up to each person how much they work.
Nothing. I have tried it before and the negative impact on my sleep and mental health was much larger than I anticipated.
I only had 1 on-call week every 8 weeks so I thought it was no big deal - however, it seems that my brain learned to "sleep with one eye open" in anticipation of problems. My sleep improved a bit after I stopped doing that but it never returned to normal. I used to sleep like a baby no matter what, now I sleep superficially with occasional bouts of insomnia. Lower quality of sleep affects everything else. If someone offered me $1M to do on-calls again, I would not take it. Some of my colleagues had no problem at all... but I was not the only one who had problems.
There's almost no realistic compensation that would ever get me to commit to it, even if it were only 2-3 days a week. Being on call for 24 hours for even just a few days a week changes so many aspects of your life. I suppose there is a number... I could do it for double my current salary like you also suggested, but I'd do that for maybe a year and just bank all the extra salary to set me up comfortably for a house and then never do on call again. For me to do on call for more than a year, I'd need enough money that, when invested, pretty much sets me up for retiring in my 40's.
I know some people might think it dumb to need double salary vs like an extra 20k a year to "just" have a couple days of on-call a week, but I just value my out of work freedom that much. No employer would ever double my salary to just have me for on-call, so then I guess I'm just never doing it :)
Back when I managed an apartment building and wasn't in software, I was on call there and it was quite harmful to my mental health, even if I only got one or two calls a month outside of normal hours. Having to carry that extra phone and knowing I could have an emergency call at really any moment did its toll on me.
My place paid something inhumanly daft like £10 p/h on call fee. If you get a call... no additional pay. And they wondered why only 2-3% of engineers were on a rota.
I told them to bump it to £12.50 and then full pay when called out (Or TOIL) and shocker... my teams went from 6% > 72% agreement. We built tech that was damn easy to maintain and had few problems beyond BI fallovers sometimes, so it hardly went used.
But having capacity in each team overnight gave huge piece of mind.
If I am expected to be ready to work, then I am getting paid the entire time whether I do any work or not. If they want me to be on call for 24hrs, then they have to pay me as if I worked the entire 24hrs. If they want to avoid paying overtime on that then they can also give me the entire following day off.
Otherwise absolutely not.
That's a good point. I'd willingly take my current salary to be on call for two days a week and that's all the work I ever do. Two very disruptive days of the week for 5 days off seems like a good deal :)
I work for a global company, so our oncall is only 12h. I think that makes quite the difference compared to 24h where you could be woken up in the middle of the night.
For our oncall, we do 12h shifts for one week, rotating. The rotation ends up having you be oncall every 2-3 months. There's a flat rate + hourly that usually works out to being somewhere between $500-$1k extra for the week, or more if there's a holiday involved.
I make a bit over $300k/year, and I'm actually exempt from a requirement to do oncall as the senior architect, but I do it anyway just to add another week to the rotation for the rest of the team, and because I don't feel like I should be exempted from suffering through supporting something I designed. The extra money isn't all that meaningful at my salary level. But it helps me understand what issues we have, how people use our systems, what our team has to deal with while they're on-call, etc. Ultimately, nobody on my team loves doing it, but the pay really softens the blow, especially for the more junior guys who aren't necessarily making as much (the on-call supplemental is the same for everyone, not based on salary or pay grade).
Now if these were 24h shifts and I'm being woken up in the middle of the night, that's a different problem. I can't think of any reasonable amount of money that I would accept for dealing with that. But this is also one of the reasons I prefer to work for large companies instead of smaller ones - global teams make it so that 24h work isn't necessary.
Now, all this being said, I interview everyone that we consider for hire, and I make the oncall requirement (and the pay structure of it) clear during the interview. Out of the 100+ candidates I've interviewed, not one has turned down an offer because on oncall. We get plenty of other reasons, but oncall hasn't been one of them yet.
I've worked buckets of on-call hours, including 24/7/365 availability for sh*tty pay. Mostly because the job market wherever I've lived has been consistently terrible at 7 - 10% real unemployment. The alternatives to tolerating exploitation were even worse jobs or unemployment.
Don't tolerate this for a second - now is the time to seize opportunities for equitable treatment while the job market is tight. Demand overtime pay, no matter whether you're salaried - 1.5x for business hours, 2x for nights/weekends, 2.5x for holidays, with a minimum of 2 weeks advance notice. And comp time of your choosing, for a maximum of 10% overtime hours in a year.
If employers don't like it, they can hire and train more people, and advocate for socializing the costs of healthcare and other benefits. There are more than enough studies showing productivity drops at > 40 hours a week. Ceasing to burn out and dispose of workers benefits everyone.
There are a bunch of variables which influence this.
In general, I think my wishlist to not "regret" call would be:
Alternatively, of course, you can get me to accept almost anything with:
Double my current salary (which is substantial) would not get me to tolerate a nightmare call situation. We're talking "retire within the year" amounts of compensation. And, of course, if you pay me enough for me to retire within the year, expect me to retire within the year. =)
I think this is exactly right. It’s more than just compensation and PTO, it’s also about having a process that protects your time and enough people and flexibility to not wreck your life and day job. My company offers something very close to this and reserves about 30% of engineering capacity to reduce live sites and, even with all that, being on call makes the engineers I work with (I’m PM) basically write off the week every 2 months.
If the company doesn’t have both a reasonable compensation plan, enough staff to handle the burden, and a process to actively reduce the on-call incident rate then move on. If they say they can’t afford this then they aren’t charging enough to fund 24-7 support.
Change your pagerduty notification settings to add a one or two minutes delay before they ping your phone. This way, flaky pages don't wake you up, without slowing down incident response that much.
Bingo.
I'll just add that if the on-call incidents are all for blatant idiocy, rather than real, serious issues that were not preventable, everyone will always walk no matter what the circumstances are. On-call is not there to babysit idiots or poorly written scripting and bad process design - fix it or I stop supporting it. On-call are there to deal with a flaming data center and nothing more, full stop. A lack of planning or intelligence on the part of management does not constitute an emergency on my part, and I will never back down on that for even one second. I'll laugh into the phone, quit on the spot with zero notice, and hang up.
On the other hand, if the fires are infrequent, issues get fixed fast rather than babysat, and the idiots don't even get to have my phone number so they can't bother me about outlook at 4am on a Sunday... I won't mind at all having to handle the occasional shitstorm. In fact I'll even enjoy it. Emergencies should not be a slog every week, they should be rare and if it's not an emergency, it can wait until Monday. Get the tech deficit under control and you'll keep everyone very happy.
I've had jobs where I was expected to be on-call 24/7. In my experience, that just made it more likely for people to skip trying to solve a problem themselves and just jump right to contacting me regardless of the severity of the situation or the time of day. I've even been called in the middle of the night while I was on vacation on the other side of the world to resolve some petty interpersonal dispute.
Since then, I've consciously chosen jobs that allow me to set firm boundaries between my work and personal time. The ability to completely disconnect from work outside of my scheduled hours is worth a lot to me. I can't see myself taking a job that would require me to go back to that anytime soon.
I'm not saying that I 100% couldn't be convinced to be on call at my current job. I'd just expect a lot in return. At a minimum:
Any attempt to threaten me into an on-call arrangement like in the example from the OP and I would be out the door.
I'd be fine with 150% of my compensation, assuming that every single day isn't a fire. I'm young(ish), have no immediate family to care for, so I'm fine grinding a bit of extra time away for more savings.
But it's not really something I have to worry about in my line of work. I'm not some online server engineer and most of my roles weren't B2B. So there's very little things that need immediate attention 24/7. Even if management loves to treat everything as a showstopper. As long as I'm not committing some huge change on Friday night, I can't imagine working on the weekend for some mess up on my end.
From my view, a number of checkboxes would need to be checked:
Pay (1-3):
Sunset / cessation clause (4-5):
4: On-call duration MUST have reasonable gaps to allow for having a life.
5: On-call duration MUST have a specified 'you only agree to on-call availability for up to this calendar date' sunset clause after which BY DEFAULT you are done being on-call until and unless you agree to be on-call again.
6: A written contractual agreement that continued employment is not contingent on accepting on-call status. Basically a legally binding no-duress clause that gives the employee STRONG legal recourse with written penalty clauses (a year of salary for example) if that employee is fired / position eliminated / suddenly has hours massively reduced after declining on-call status.
7: Next-day call-off. Basically some form of reasonable solution that if you get called up to do crisis management or whatever at 2AM, you just got no sleep that night and need to have the next day off. That day needs to be paid because you can't push a situation on someone where 'we expect you to unexpectedly wake up and manage a crisis from 2A-6A and, sure, you can call off work but then we actually get to pay you less overall'.
One of the important principles that I think of in this situation is how pay is dependent. Time on-call needs to be compensated, and time called-up needs to be further compensated. The compensation needs to fill 2 basic requirements: it needs to be enough to make it fully worth it to the employee, and it needs to serve as a real cost to the employer so they can't afford to just push everyone to be on-call all the time, and can't afford to trivially call people up in the middle of the night for unimportant or non-time-sensitive issues.
There are schedules where on call is a matter of compensation. 1 week in (some large number of weeks), and we can discuss the financial trade off.
Every 2nd/3rd day is a hard pass. It rules out ever having extended unavailability and would be incredibly disruptive to my ability to plan my personal life.
It depends on the company and work atmosphere, here the person standby basically gets one call a week due to all our redundancy and automation. At a previous employer I refused to do on call due to the mess the department was in.
But at the current employer I'm on call one week every month.
They're paying a standby fee and 4 hours of pay for every call we get after 17:00 (times 1.5 on the weekend/national holidays).
And I must say that I find this reasonable as they also give me 40 days of holidays.
I currently do a week of on call every 2 months or so. I suppose the amount of money I would want is how much I’m paid, since I’m still there. It is fairly standard practice for tech, that being said. Including stock I make about 423k a year. So far I’m fine with it, it’s annoying for that week but it mainly means carrying your laptop around. For holidays, the rotation is long enough that it can be planned around. If you’re on call during holidays you get it back as PTO so I can usually score another week or so of PTO by volunteering when I’ll be stuck doing family stuff anyway.
I actually do work a small on-call rotation at a startup. It's every several weeks and pretty relaxed. You just have to acknowledge in 15 min and triage for hand-off / be within 1 hour of your laptop. Most of our issues seem to happen when we're awake, and as a small team, we're actually pretty good about jumping in. It helps also that I'm introverted / a homebody, so I tend to close to my laptop or an hour away.
That being said, I'm not sure if I would have taken this job if I'd known. And now that I have this job, I can say that if you took my existing situation and made it once a week or every 4 weeks, or if it was every 6 weeks but busier, I'd be really lobbying to hire another person. I don't want my first thought when scheduling anything to be "Oh no, I might be on-call." I work as an engineer for the flexible hours and convenience, so no feasible amount of compensation seems to come to mind. (Although 2x my hourly rate per hour of overtime seems kind of nice.)
I work a job with an on-call rota. We get called rarely and it's 15 min to acknowledge and then 30 min to get online. I get paid north of 150k and work about 32hr a week. Once a year I'll get paged and normally I can deal with it quickly, though once i was on call for 24 hours. We know months in advanced when we will be on-call and folk will routinely swap weeks or days. My wife has a similar job. So we just make sure that we aren't both on-call at the same time.
I have a company hotspot and laptop, so as long as I can get data, I'm good. I will travel with my laptop. That said, we only get paged if stuff is on fire, like really bad. A customer having a minor issue doesn't cause me to get paged, everything needs to be down for me to get called in the middle of the night.
I’ve got sleep issues that are hard enough to manage as it is. Money alone wouldn’t be enough unless it were an unreasonable amount (like, retire in a couple of years kind of level), but I’d consider trying it if I could do a three consecutive day work week, two of which were 8 hours normal and the remainder on call - which I guess would work out to costing roughly double what I’m paid after accounting for the 40% effective pay rise and the overheads of hiring someone else part time to cover the other half of the week.
That level of lifestyle transformation would be enough to risk giving it a shot, but even then it’d depend pretty heavily on how it actually impacted sleep (calls themselves, and anxiety about calls). Might well turn out there’s just no way it could be workable for me regardless of the offer - and given that even in an in-demand field I don’t think there are a lot of people lining up to hand out three day, six figure positions it seems unlikely I’ll ever have occasion to find out.
Crazy amount of perspective in this thread. I don’t agree with most of it.
I used to work cybersecurity ops getting paid $120k/yr. I didn’t take on call very seriously. One day I get paged at 2am and worked until 8am on a bad problem. I got a $2k bonus for my temporary, tactical fix that day. Things got patched up later that day.
I used to drink on nights I was technically on call. Wouldn’t bring my laptop places. Things were usually fine. The company never suffered but I recognize I was playing with fire. As a manager I wouldn’t want me as an employee but I got lucky!
My schedule was typically one full week of on call per month.
I don’t do on call anymore in my current position. I don’t miss it. I would totally do it again if I got paid more. But I get paid a shitload already so I wouldn’t be tempted. I would avoid a job with on call in the future.
Pretty such same. I had to actually do something once or twice. And the second time I’d already prepared a solution in advance to be deployed if needed after hours.
This was at a very early stage startup with a few million in annual revenue and a few thousand signups per day.
If those were the only days I worked, and I got substantial time off so that I could take long vacations, then I would seriously consider it. I would be willing to at least trial it and see how I go; it would depend a lot on how frequent the interruptions were (especially at night) and how difficult my duties were.
I would be extremely difficult to convince otherwise. Increasing my salary alone would not be sufficient because my expenses are low and I already put most of my income into savings without thinking about it. The thing I really want is more spare time, so if on-call duties came with a big increase in free time (actual free time where I'm not on call), then it might be worth it.
I was fully aware On-Call rota was part of the job and after I changed jobs (laterally, same company) we ended up changing the type of on-call to major incident management only. So on rotation I may pick up a call in the evening hours, not even 24/7, set up a bridge, get communication going, and peace out when it's solved. I'm no longer technically involved with resolution which is an incredible relieve.
They pay me 400 euro for standby, with an increased rate of 125% per hour of work done after hours. In the two years I've done this I've had to pick up a call after hours maybe twice.
Frequency is a good reason I don't mind, and flexibility is another. If I don't want to do it I can easily transfer my week to someone else. We've recently onboarded a bunch more folk so the rota is even longer making it an alright job.
It would be a much harder sell if it were 24/7.
Meh. I work remotely for a Silicon Valley startup that pays me more money than I know what to do with in the midwest US, beyond just saving for early retirement. I have long since passed the point of diminishing returns on salary.
Monetary incentives at this point need to be way bigger than any company will reasonably pay, getting into "retiring in a couple of years" levels of overpaying me. If a job wants to incentivize me to do something, giving me large amounts of time off is going to be much more effective.
(I do technically have an on-call rotation at my current job, but it's not 24/7, and I don't think I've ever actually been paged. Mostly it's just watching logs during normal work hours.)
Pretty much none. I could only see myself being on call for a business I own or own a substantial stake in. I turned down a position with 40% travel because do not want to be away from my family and my hobbies. I would view being on call no differently.
I do pick up the phone on vacation, during the weekends, and in the evening but it is rare and rarely more than a 5 minute conversation.
For me it is much more about organizational maturity whether it is something I'd consider. Are there playbooks/runbooks established for how to handle incidents? Are there post-mortems to analyse root causes and are actions taken to mitigate the likelihood of repeated events?
On top of those basics there would need to be some on-call compensation (for just being available) and a incident response compensation (for when shit hits the fan). In addition I'd require mandatory paid time off after being on call for 1 day or so. It would also need to be on a rotation shared between a few competent people so its not an ongoing stressor.
Pay me for the time. That would be the one change in my current situation I want.
I have a job that actually pays above market for what I do, and have one week of on-call every 9 weeks. It's not so bad, and if I end up working overnight (on-call is 5-5) for an excessive time I can leave work early. It's "part of the job," but they don't want me messing up or miserable at one part because I had to fix another part of the job.
I used to work on call on a team that rarely ever got paged (~once a year), and if so it was usually easily fixable. We also got compensated for being on call regardless of whether or not we were paged. In around 4 years of doing this there was only one page which required a lot of attention, but it was the worst incident of my life. If I consider the total compensation over that time period I'd say it was worth it, but I also don't miss it
I'm technically on call 24/7 as I am the lead engineer at my small company as I am the only that can reasonably resolve some issues (bus factor of one), but I have made it a goal over the years to get our infrastructure and code base reliable enough that I now only have to deal with things like this once or twice a year. I've done heavy on call duties at previous jobs, and I will not do them again. My family time is too important to give away like that for anything less than "I can retire in a few years" type of money.
I changed careers (developer to product designer) primarily because I kept getting stuck in rolls with on-call requirements (despite explicitly saying I refused to do it when hired). And that was before I had a kid. With a kid, there's no way in hell I'd do it. I simply don't care enough about a company making money to sacrifice more of my time.
I'm on call for work at a university. I am provided free housing (including all utilities) and a (limited) meal plan.
That's what I need. Especially since many of us respond in person. At my current level I respond only by phone most of the time, but still, that's the trade off. (I know it isn't tech but it's a lot more response time and very common for residence life in higher ed)