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Comment by soneca | Hacker News Reader

I always assumed that pay for hours outside of regular working hours would be higher than regular pay.

The pay for outside working hours applies whether or not you are getting paged. That's 128 hours / 3 = 42.67 hours of extra pay during an on call week. The on call week also gives incentive to fix technical debt and build a more stable production system so you don't get paged.

Yeah, makes sense. Forgot the detail that most of on call hours are not strictly working. So Google scheme seems fair

Waiting to work is working. Would a hospital surgeon only charge for time holding a knife? Don’t be absurd.

Spent years taking oncall shifts. Nah, it really isn't. The two things I couldn't do were see a movie and go hike.

Otherwise life as normal. Laptop in the car, 4g hotspot on my phone. Only actually had to fix an issue remotely a few times (once with only my phone in a restaurant after a martial arts class).

Hospitals do not pay more than normal work hours for on-call, though they do usually pay some amount.

https://physiciansthrive.com/physician-compensation/on-call-...

If I'm at home cooking dinner, I'm not "waiting to work" though.

Yes, you cannot go on a hike, which is why you get paid. You don't get paid more than you do for your normal time working though.

Hospitals are probably one of the places uses on-call the most. A nurse or surgeon on-call doesn't sit around the hospital (at least not where I am from). They sit at home watching TV or eating dinner with friends, knowing that if there is an emergency, they have to go to work.

So they are paid for being available at a diminished rate, and if their availability is needed, then they are paid overtime.

Absurd analogy. My point is that I think it’s fair to pay less than regular hour pay when you are “waiting to work”. I also think it’s fair to pay more than regular hour pay when you are working outside of regular working hours.

For non-business hour oncall, you usually only need to mitigate with minimum effort. E.g. for a typical overload situation, up sizing the pool or getting an emergency ceiling loan is enough, and you can offload further preventative measures or root cause investigation to the next oncaller when they are in business hour, or wait until next Monday.

Assuming you have 12 hour shifts, I always felt it was tuned so that a full weekend oncall shift (2 days of 12 hours each) gives you 2 days of vacation.

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