Ask HN: What on-call benefits do you get in your company?

I've seen different definitions of "on-call". In my company, if you are "on-call", you work your regular hours, and after that you are "on-call" for emergency prod stuff. You get a 30% bonus on that day's salary for each day you are on-call. So if you're on-call 15 days, you get a 15% bonus for that month, if you're on call a week it's 7.5%, and of course, full month is 30%. There's no difference if you get called every day or don't get called at all.

samstave · 4 years ago

Thats a pretty dope scheme.

What I did for employees as we did a rotating OPs on-call, was to give the on-call emp a friday or monday off on the week they aren't on call (to be arranged with the team) -- basically, if you were on call for a week 24/7 for that on call week... when it was not your on call week - you could pick a day off of your choice.

commentsgaloer2 · 4 years ago

Yeah, as long as you don't get a lot of calls it's great.

What I'm having trouble figuring out is if in other companies (like yours) when you are "on-call" for a week, do you work or don't work regular 9-5 M-F? Or are you "on-call" for the entire week, with no other responsabilities, maybe similar to a doctor?

I'm assuming some companies do and some companies don't, but not sure...

MSP | New Zealand | paid $90/day for simply being on call, plus for any out-of-hours callouts we can choose (on a per callout basis) $100/hr with 50‰ lieu time OR $50/hr with 100% lieu time | my team's current rotation has us on call for 1 week out of every 8 weeks. Most weeks average 3-10 callouts.

I should add that we're all salary workers, the hourly rates mentioned are in addition to normal salary. Reading some of the other responses I'm feeling really fortunate.

deserted · 4 years ago

This is indeed one of the best in the thread! It's rare to see both 'oncall only once every two months" and "Paid very well for both on call time and active time". Lieu time is also usually unofficial.

What does a typical callout look like?

McNutty · 4 years ago

Thanks to proper change process and redundancy of key infrastructure...maybe once a month there will be a serious problem that raises the stress levels. But most of the time it is stuff like short power outages or ISP outages for non-critical infrastructure.

We also have a good bonus scheme but you're not eligible for bonus unless you've done some on call time (amongst other KPIs) . So between all of that, people don't complain about being on call here! It is pretty easy to get a day covered by a colleague if it's your wife's birthday or something. Overall it's a great place to work for!

wnolens · 4 years ago

FANGetc. | US | zero benefits | 15-20% of the job

Hate it, but am well paid so mostly just shut up and try to make the experience better for myself and colleagues.

If ever a shift gets bad (up late fixing something, or spurious alarms in the middle of the night), I take a day off (unreported). No boss has ever had a problem with that. They know the job sucks.

WFHRenaissance · 4 years ago

Wait a minute... y'all get on-call benefits?

doubled112 · 4 years ago

"Included in your salary"

mrtranscendence · 4 years ago

I don't have a job where I need to be on-call, but as far as I'm aware those who are on-call at my company receive nothing except time off if (and only if) they're called in. I could be wrong, though. I've been on projects where people were dismayed that such an SLA would not be available, but life is too short, and my projects (mostly Python and R packages) are unlikely to break spontaneously as long as they're used properly (e.g. version pinned).

toper-centage · 4 years ago

Isn't that an incentive to break things on purpose and be called in more often?

I'm assuming it's not "spend 5 minutes ACKing a page, get a day off". I have seen it as "If you get paged and have to work 11pm to 2am, cancel your morning meetings and come in at noon". It isn't really much incentive to break things.

txsoftwaredev · 4 years ago

I've never heard of on-call benefits as a full-time employee. It's always just part of the role.

RegnisGnaw · 4 years ago

Semi-Govt IT Organization | Canada | Time off in liu for any oncall time spent + one day off automatically for every half fortnight spend oncall | Half a fortnight every four fortnights

On average I get about 1-3 calls per week oncall with total time spend between 2-3 hours. Everything is remote.

How many smoots is half a fortnight every quads of fortnights? How does one only play half of Fortnight?

So 1 day off per week of oncall, and oncall once every 8 weeks.

Do you live in a crossword puzzle? That's the only spot I see "half fortnight" instead of week.

ingvul · 4 years ago

In my company the greatest benefit is that: it is not mandatory. So I'm never on-call. My free time is too valuable for just a bit more of money.