Are you on-call after business hours?

Question

I'm a software engineer with 20 years experience, 8 years at my current employer. I am happy with my position and employer. That is until recently. I was notified I would have to start taking a week long 24/7 on-call rotation with 5 other team members. So, I am on-call 1 week out of 6 weeks. The alerts are generated from DataDog/New Relic monitors. I have never handled on-call after hours and I'm not excited to start at this point in my career with many family obligations and a desire for clear work/life boundaries. I was offered no additional compensation for the added responsibilities. I find being on-call invasive and disruptive, not only for me but also my family. When on-call, I sleep in a separate room from my wife so that her sleep is not disrupted. I also have a hard time falling asleep knowing that an alert could go off at any time.I'm curious to hear how common this is in the industry. Are you on-call? Was it part of your initial hire responsibilities or added later? Did you receive any compensation for your duties? Am I going to be in the same situation if I change jobs/companies?

NickRandom · Accepted Answer

When I first started in the industry I was on call 24/7 (since being on-call is a P.I.T.A. that nobody wants - ergo 'give it to the new guy'). There was a very small stipend paid for being on duty with a reasonable rate if I received any calls out of hours that varied depending on if I could resolve it remotely / over the phone (aka - 'Have you tried rebooting it? If not, try it and call me back if that doesn't solve it') with time and a half (including travel time) for anything that needed a hands-on solution.
As I progressed up the ladder I became second level support (i.e. if the 'junior guy' couldn't fix it I would get a call from them to see if I had any magic wand solutions).
As I progressed further up the ladder I began carrying three phones (one work phone, one personal phone and one for high value clients).
To this day, I have kept that third phone number active and still accept calls on it even though I am semi-retired.
I agree that being on call is disruptive and I always had trouble sleeping just in case I missed a call. I also found that not being able to drink/'smoke' etc immensely disruptive.
Being on-call on a week long rotation as an engineer with 20 years experience (as in your case) I would be like 'ah hell no, stuff it up your jumper'. Being asked to do that for zero recompense would be a hard 'No' for me but I guess it depends on your own personal circumstances in terms of being able to walk if they (employer) insisted that I either suck it up or ship out.
I’m sorry I can’t offer you any more concrete advice except my own personal experiences but hopefully others here will chime in with some more helpful input.
Best of luck.

icedchai · Answer

At a previous company (3 employers ago), we got like an extra $500/week for being on call. It was optional and about 7 or 8 people were in rotation. Some weeks, there would be no alerts. Other weeks, it'd be a total nightmare.At another company, I was the only person on call for about 4 years, no additional compensation. I controlled all the alerting, so I'd just turn down the alerts to the bare minimum. Unless the site was completely down, I didn't get paged. Everything else waited until morning. It was a B2B SaaS business and very little actively happened outside of US working hours.

JonChesterfield · Answer

If you didn't do this for the first 20 years that's probably your answer. I'd expect people to refuse and/or quit in response to that, any of your colleagues gone yet? Usually a bit of a lag to get the alternative lined up.