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Comment by biot | Hacker News Reader

For those doing on-call and required to be responsive to alerts at all times during your shift, one thing to think about is your pay for this burden. Some cardiologists get over $3K/day to just be on-call (whether or not anything comes up) which means keeping within range of the hospital, being sober, not being more than a few minutes away from their phone, and so on. While generally nobody's life is on the line should a server go down, if you're expected to go beyond "if I hear my phone alert and I'm sober and am near my laptop" level of effort, ensure you are compensated appropriately.

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>Ensure you are compensated appropriately.

I agree 100%

My last company is notorious for official-unofficial on call duties.

You must remain within 30 minutes of the office, be near your cell phone and sober, 24x7. Because there is no official policy, there was no rotation, so technically I was always on call. Their official stance on compensation is that salaried employees can't get overtime, and it's covered by the annual bonus anyway. Yep, unlimited on-call & overtime covered by a ~7% bonus that pays out about 50% of the time.

I was once out of the country on a statutory holiday and didn't answer my personal cell phone (roaming would have killed me), which caused me to get reprimanded and lose my bonus for the entire year.

After some back and forward I quit soon after.

I worked for a small company with a >25 person IT team once, and everyone participated in the on-call. When you were on-call, you were on-call for the entire department. I worked IT security, but I was on-call for networking, servers, code, database, and even power outages. The shifts were for two weeks straight and were non-transferrable, so we couldn't trade off. We needed to be sober, ready to go any time of day or night, and able to be on-site at any of the locations around the city within half an hour. Even if the phone rang at 3am.

I quit after seven months. I wasn't getting paid nearly enough to go through that.

3k a day? do you have a source for that?

Appears to be less than 3k/day on average. Source: http://www.acep.org/Clinical---Practice-Management/Survey--M...

Thanks for looking this up. I did some research many years ago when I was in an unpleasant on-call situation (unreliable third-party dependency) and negotiated pay for it as a result. I recall seeing a $3500 daily rate figure at the time for a cardio surgeon, but that may have been an outlier.

While the numbers may be off, one point I didn't make in my initial post but should have is that anybody doing on-call is providing a valuable service. It's no different than paying a babysitter to watch TV while your kids sleep. Both babysitters and devops/IT/whatever are compensated for their ability to act in case the unexpected happens. If someone's not getting paid for that, then it must not be valuable to the company to have that coverage.

Yeah, the article linked there is nicely specific. From the article (and these are median):

Neurological surgeons had the highest median daily rate for providing on-call coverage, about $2,000 a day. Near the top of the pay scale were neurologists ($1,500), cardiovascular surgeons ($1,600), internists ($1,050), and anesthesiologists ($800).

Among the specialists earning lower median daily rates for on-call compensation were: psychiatry ($500), general surgery ($500) gastroenterology ($500), ophthalmology ($300), and family medicine without obstetrics ($300), according to the MGMA survey data.

They probably get a lot of repeat work when they tell the patient how much it's costing them.

If you're calling an emergency cardiologist after-hours, you're probably not immediately worried about how much it costs.

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