Being on-call is working. FULL STOP | Hacker News Reader

Being on-call is working. FULL STOP

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84 pointsmiles23 comments

The problem is that on-call is something in between work and not work. Depending on how often you are actually paged, it is closer to one or the other. As such, the policy I usually implement is simple:

- Being on-call is compensated, although at a much lower rate. The compensation is for the inconvenience of having to carry you computer with you, not being able to get drunk, not sleeping as well (if that applies to you), etc.

- When you get paged, you can generously compensate that time as TOIL. E.g. if you get paged and you realise it's a false positive and go back to bed, you can still compensate 2h as you need to fall back asleep and likely will not be as rested. If you have to do something for 4 hours, take off a day because you likely had to cancel some personal plans or have not had any meaningful sleep at night.

Do firemen get paid for sleeping at the station, or only for hours when there is an emergency?

It actually depends on the country (and I assume even state and city). Where I grew up, most firemen actually sleep at home and not at the station. They have "normal" work hours during which they do non-emergency work, such as train, maintain equipment, raise awareness for fire prevention, etc. and they get paid for a target work week of ~40 hours. Being called out "outside" of hours is compensated, AFAIK in TOIL. Point being, there is no one size fits all model and it has to work for your environment.

Asking for being on-call for 7 days to be equivalent of 168h of work, i.e. after you have been on-call for a week you go on vacation for 3 weeks is just as unreasonable in most situations as companies asking their staff to be on-call without additional compensation.

If I can't drop everything, fly abroad, and disappear into the wild because my boss needs me to do something, then I'm at work. Everything else is just an excuse to pay me less whilst still taking a tole on me mentally.

If you can't turn your phone off and temporarily forget everything about your profession, you're working.

Nope. If my boss considered my "on-call" time as work, I would be working all ten hours, all the time.

I am not ready for an extra ten hours of work a week, and my boss knows that. He only calls if there is an emergency, and even then he first asks me how the time is for me and tries to work with me on that.

I am on call, have to have my laptop with me, and will work if needed. That is calculated into my salary, not as hours of work, (which it isn't and I don't want) but as hours of on-call.

How can this be seen otherwise?

> This is calculated into my salary

Well there it is. You are at work and compensated for it.

This seems like an unusual “on call” experience. When I’m on call and something is wrong, there’s no negotiating if it’s a good time since the system is broken and needs to be fixed before it impacts (more) customers.

I have to be available anytime day or night to get online and solve an unknown problem and have to put my own life on hold to accommodate this need.

It sounds like you just occasionally get called by your boss who asks you to do work outside of normal business hours, not that you’re on call in the traditional sense.

Or put it even more bluntly, if you can't be drunk or completely offline in case your boss calls you, you're at work.

Based on the example of a lawyer I wonder how this could change if you managed to call it being "on retainer" the way a lawyer does. Having an IT guy on retainer really does function the same as for a lawyer - they are there to consult and solve problems when and if they arise using their domain expertise you lack. If nothing comes up, you still pay them a fee for the time they spent being available for you.

Expected response time is a major difference, no? (although I guess for lawyers there might also be an expectation to move now if something urgent (police raid etc) is happening? not too familiar with how that looks and is agreed on in practice)

This is correct but it’s more than that: it’s beyond any reasonable dispute. Anyone with a job description that requires them to be responsive to on-demand needs “on the job” will recognize it.

I wasn’t scheduled for on-call at my last job, likely because I was already working 80+ hour weeks for months on end, but if anyone suggested it I would have had a very abrupt and serious conversation about comp adjustment.

I’m not sure what is standard compensation for being on-call but at my previous place of work IT ops would do out of hours one week in four in return for one day off in-lieu. You’d get on average three call-outs a week which could be handled remotely. It still seemed like a very poor deal; I don’t know what is standard?

I did significant on call time, with significant life interruptions as a young man, and I felt fairly compensated by stock options... which paid off. If they ended up worthless, or if I'd been asked to do significant on call once my kids arrived, then I'd feel different.

In short: it depends.

I agree that being on-call is work, but I find the comparisons to other jobs misguided.

For example, installing a swimming pool or building a car is a lot of work / resources for the "setup" that has to be paid for. However, the person who built the pool/car is not working while you swim.

On the other hand, being on-call has zero setup cost (except maybe grabbing your laptop), but you still have to be there whether your servers swim or not.

Still, I hated being on-call. Fixing servers in the middle of the night when nobody uses them, that's the definition of madness to me.

A better swimming pool analogy would be if you hired a lifeguard for a swimming pool but only paid them if they had to rescue someone.

As usual, software engineers are special snowflakes.

Plenty of jobs have on-call: nurses, firefighters, doctors, police.

They should and do compensate differently for that requirement.

But this is no way a peculiarity.

How many of those jobs are paid hourly so they're still getting paid?

My job as an "IT professional" is exempt from most labour laws concerning overtime pay and time off requirements. You have to be careful and look out for yourself because the gov't isn't going to.

It's certainly not unique to this profession. It is one of those places having a union seems to pay off, or at least it did in this area.

Pros and cons though. I'm not constantly exposed to sick people, and I don't get shot at or run into burning buildings for my pay cheque.

https://www.ontario.ca/document/industries-and-jobs-exemptio...

Varies. ER doctors are usually paid hourly, others (e.g. obstetrician delivering a baby) are usually paid from productivity metrics regardless of incident duration.

Regardless, the article's thesis was that even if there isn't an incident, one is still "working" just by being available.

And that aspect is the same.

Title is slightly ambiguous. For those that assumed like me, this isn't saying that being on call is working well. It is saying "being on call should be considered working time".

“Being on-call is work” would suffice. I had the same confusion before clicking through. That said, article is correct!

Being on-call should be limited to a single work shift per day. Period. Anything more is not just overtime but creates health and safety risks

If I have to work in an office in a city 9-5 and show up in person, I'm pretty much going to spend the rest of my day in my home on my computer anyway. I cant go to Bali and back in one evening. Most of the year I cant even head down to the beach for a swim locally anyway all the sunlight is gone. Hell I'm going to be in too shitty of a mood to enjoy myself even if I did. Any day that I was in a city, drove in peak traffic, and spent time in an office is ruined for me. Does that mean every day that I met those criteria I actually worked from wake up to fall asleep? No of course not.

It's just reduced utility. I can do less with an hour that's sandwiched between two days where I had to work than one surrounded by many days of free time. I can do even less with an hour on a day in which I have to work. Then less with an hour where I have to work in both the previous and next hour. Or yeah, an hour in which I need to be ready to start working at short notice.

Then true remote, remote but same time zone/country, remote except for once every couple weeks, in office most days, in office every day; all heavily impact the utility of your time off as well. Same as, if you are required to be in the office, the location of it.

Being reasonably bathed, not having offensive tattoos, coming home physically exhausted, mentally exhausted, emotionally exhausted.

Different jobs, roles, careers, etc have a ton of different impacts on the utility of free time.

The idea of picking one specific reduction in utility and declaring this one counts as work in all caps and bold seems arbitrary and useless at best and hindering ones ability to think about the costs of the job at worst.

Like what's to gain? Instead of getting paid $X to work 40 hours per week plus 10 on call you get paid $X to work 50 hours per week of which 10 are on call? Ok cool you shuffled some categories around. It doesn't change anything practical.

They're paying me for some reason and thats what goes on my job title and appears on my payslip but its not why they need to pay me. Getting worked up about on call hours not getting counted as to why they pay you makes as much sense to me as calling up HR and going all "sorry theres been a mistake. My payslip says you paid me $X for 40 hours of software development but actually you're mostly paying me to not be on a tropical island and to put up with Jeff. I demand Listening To Jeff and Not On Island be listed as line items of work performed."

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