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What benefits do you get for being on-call?

  1. How much extra do you get paid for being on an call rotation?
  2. Is the salary/benefits the same for inconvenience of being on call and working on an incident?
  3. What other rules do you have? Eg. max time working on an incident, rota for highly unsociable hours?
  4. How many people are on the same schedule with you?
  5. Where are you based, EU/US/UK/Canada?
10 comments
  • I'd personally appreciate if you explained the intention behind asking these questions.

    Is this for your personal market-awareness? Or is it part of a survey (community or corporate?)

    • Based in the US.
    • Salary employee (overtime doesn't apply).
    • We embrace "shift-left" methodology, which means that we own our stack, soup-to-nuts.
    • It makes zero sense for us to build an application, then toss it over the fence to another team that knows nothing about it.
    • We partner with specialist teams for any skill that we don't have on the team. While many of us have Dev and also Ops skills, we partner (for example) with our SRE team on certain matters. We still own the work, but we "sub-contract" it out to our SRE team.
    • We devs are on-call, and the SRE team that supports us is also on-call. Both teams get paged for any production incident. Our team is ultimately on-the-hook, but SREs are there to have our backs.
    • It empowers/enforces us to make sure that we don't ship crap. And if we do, we get paged.
    • We think about SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, and work to identify trouble spots in the application.

    Based on the way you wrote your questions, I sense that your situation is completely different from mine. But we work hard to eliminate silos, eliminate fence-tossing, and partner together with experts to ensure that what we ship is of a high quality so that we don't get paged in the middle of the night. The better we do our daytime jobs, the more we can sleep in the nighttime.

    1. I get 15/hr just for being on-call. This is on top of my normal salary. Whether I receive a call or not.
    2. See above
    3. We have a maximum engagement time of 12 hours, then rotate with your backup on-call resource to keep folks fresh.
    4. A primary and a backup are rotated out of a team of about 10 or so. There is always 2 levels of escalations available.
    5. U.S. - Remote
  • Based in Israel, don't get anything. This is standard as our contacts usually specify that a third of our salary is legally considered compensation for overtime.

    There's no defined schedule, it's mostly "whoever is available will take care of the incident, and if multiple people are available then they should join too". It will obviously not go smoothly if you're never available. This is terrible, I wonder if there are any other places that behave like this.

    It should be noted that this isn't weird considered the working hours are quite bad compared to the OECD, not terrible though.

10 comments