What is your company's on-call compensation scheme?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19746348

by jyounker • 7 years ago

21 25 7 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I am helping to develop a compensation scheme for on-call developers. I have my own ideas about this, but I need to get more information to validate/invalidate my current ideas.

How does your company compensate developers for after-hours on-call work?

rightbyte• 7 years ago

I get monthly wage divided by 700 per hour on call on weekends or 1400 otherwise.

If I'm called/pinged and I have to do something remote I get 1h pay with monthly wage divided by 72 added to the hourly wage.

If I need to move my ass I get 3h atleast.

pmiller2• 7 years ago

There isn’t one, but my team also hasn’t been paged after hours in the entire time I’ve been here. Even if we were, most of our stuff has no direct revenue impact if it fails for a little while, and the real time requirements are on the order of hours or days before anyone outside the team notices.

Theoretically, if one of us were up at 3 AM fighting a fire, nobody would expect that person to come in at their normal time and just work as if it never happened. Coming in later or not at all would be well within bounds in that case.

8fingerlouie• 7 years ago

it depends if you're scheduled to be on call or not. Both are possible, i.e. deploying a new system to production will usually require a scheduled watch, where a service crashing in the middle of the night is an unscheduled call.

schedules are rewarded by a fixed amount ($10'ish) per hour for as long as the watch goes on, with 2-3 hours of 150-200% hourly wages per call, depending on the time of the call.

Unscheduled calls are in the 3-3.5 hours of 150-200% hourly wages per call.

calls during vacation days are rewarded with the above, and a replacement vacation day.

The rules are specified in article 19 in the following : https://www.fanet.dk/system/files/publication_files/standard...

apfel9122• 7 years ago

My team had a fixed ~$300 per week for out of hours/weekend oncall. The philosophy was that by not having payouts per oncall, it would incentivise the team to prioritise more stability / resilience work.

thedevindevops• 7 years ago

Did anyone on the team volunteer to be oncall in that case?

apfel9122• 7 years ago

It was a team of four, and barring vacations, we took it in turns every week.

When the system was buggy, we all dreaded it. When it was good, we all got basically free money.

Over public holidays, we did volunteer as the pay rate was higher still.

masto• 7 years ago

You don't say where you are, but I hope you are including your company's lawyers in the conversation. Some countries have very particular rules that you need to be aware of.

TheGrumpyBrit2• 7 years ago

2 hours pay for each day I'm on call, increased to 4 hours for weekends or bank holidays (since we aren't in the office during the day so it's effectively another 8 hours on call per day), plus minimum 2 hours at double time for any actual calls received.

So effectively 18 hours pay per week for being on call then 4 hours pay for any calls received, since it would be extremely rare for a call out to require more than 2 hours.

dmarlow• 7 years ago

Are you a salaried employee?

TheGrumpyBrit2• 7 years ago

Yes, but I still have an effective hourly rate.

pickle-wizard• 7 years ago

I think it is good that you are looking at compensating on-call. I've never worked at a place that gave any kind of compensation for on-call.

One of the things I've like to receive is not money, but extra days off. An extra few hundred bucks isn't going to make much difference in my quality of life, but a three day weekend would.

cimmanom• 7 years ago

Allowing participants to choose between financial and time off compensation (at roughly equivalent hourly rates) is kind of a cool idea.

Of course, PTO is less of a clear incentive at places with “unlimited” PTO.

sethammons• 7 years ago

At my work place (which is the best place I've ever worked, hands down), we are considered highly paid engineers and on-call work is just part of our normal comp. On your given team, you do one week of on call work, and then rotate to the next team member. Usual team size is about 5 people. If something happens and you find yourself brutalized over night, the manager usually gives you a comp day.

Edit: we've done a lot of work around auto-remediation and removal of non-actionable alerts. Alerts should need human intervention. Some on call rotations we don't get a single page, some are noisy. But usually, I might wake up early or in the middle of the night once or twice every other rotation. Figured that was worth qualifying my answer.

Junk_Collector• 7 years ago

Not specifically software developers but several of the places I have worked at broke their on-call positions as follows

Non-salaried -10% base pay differential for on-call employees -2 rotating employees were scheduled at a time as first point of on call contact. This gives people a bit of buffer to plan their lives even though they are technically on call. -All time called in paid as over-time (1.5x base pay rate)

Salaried -10% pay differential -For each on call hour worked, received 1 hour of vacation time. This kicked in after working more than 8 hours over their normal 80 hour pay period but applied to all hours worked. Kicked in immediately if they were called in on hours that were not pre-scheduled. Vacation time paid expired in 1 year and was paid out at 1x salary rate as of time of accrual if not taken.

Some work environments and hours commanded additional pay bonuses. i.e. overnight work was paid at +15% of base.

Most importantly, whatever you work out, run it by legal and HR to make sure you aren't violating any labor laws and make sure you don't abuse your employees.

zck• 7 years ago

"It's part of your job so do it".

I'm not in charge of it, and don't particularly like the answer.

tssva• 7 years ago

If you are salaried and aware of the on call requirements prior to being hired then I don't see an issue with this. It is just another factor to be considered as you negotiate your compensation.

amanaplanacanal• 7 years ago

We got 1/6 of hourly pay for each hour on call. If actually called, paid straight time for time spent actually working. If required to come into office, 2 hour minimum.

wolfmd• 7 years ago

I was salaried and shared a weekly 24/7 on-call rotation with three other engineers. We had higher salaries than engineers that were not on-call (though I don't have specific numbers) and we were given the day off when the on-call shift was over. It was a pretty small company.

suhailpatel• 7 years ago

Two colleagues did a survey of on-call compensation: https://oncall.wtf/articles/2019-02/on-call-survey-2019.

It’s quite skewed towards the UK due to the social circles and reach but still useful nonetheless. I’m sure they would appreciate more data points!

happppy• 7 years ago

We get full day salary if we are required to work on Saturday with free meals.

p.s regular day meals are compensated, we pay half of actual price.

Niksko• 7 years ago

We get payed some sort of hourly rate for every hour we're on call (obviously excluding business hours), and then the hourly rate increases sharply for the duration of any incidents.

astawiarski• 7 years ago

It's optional for all team members after around a year in, when they are familiar enough with the systems. The reason it is optional is that not everbody is able to do it - due to family, health etc.

There is additional pay for on call, based on numbers of days served. It does not matter if there were alerts or not - this is especially important: we don't get paid for work but availability. This incentives to harden systems and adjust monitoring well.

We also rotate regularly.

Each alert is followed up with incident report. If there was a lot of work, manager would give extra time off.

Hope it helps :)

acranox• 7 years ago

Make it enough that most people wouldn’t want to freely take themselves out of the rotation and take the loss, if they had the option. I’m on a 5 person team, and we rotate weekly. $500 per shift. So that’s $5000 per year. I hate on call, but I’ll take that pay. It used to be $100. At that price, I would rather never be on call and loose the $1000 year ( pre tax).

Make on call pay enough that people might want to trade shifts.

And then maybe let buy and sell their shifts.

That’s my 2 cents.

whttheuuu• 7 years ago

Would be funny to see PagerDuty launch an auction/market for taking on-call slots. Price goes up until someone takes it.

rubinelli• 7 years ago

We are not compensated monetarily, but we get one day off for each week on-call, and any time worked is also added up, so we can take extra days off later.

What is your company's on-call compensation scheme?

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