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Comment by candiddevmike | Hacker News Reader

What I tell people new to on-call: ask for overtime, time off, or some form of compensation (and don't go along with the "it's part of your standard compensation" bullshit).

On-call is you agreeing to give your time, your weekends, your freedom to your work. It's beyond the standard 8-5. Don't trade that for free.

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I always tell my guys to take a whole day if they are paged at night.

do you work with any women or 100% men?

Not OP, but I'm from the Midwest, and around here guys has always (and seemingly will always) mean a non gender specific group of people. It's a shame that folks see it as a micro aggression these days, as we really aren't being offensive with it. It's just really, really hard to change the behavior when most of the Midwest (women included) are still perfectly fine referring to groups of people as guys.

If it makes you feel better, I have worked with lots of diverse groups and everyone understood guys as a gender neutral term. I think people are a lot meaner and nitpicky online than in real life

Sometimes girls get bothered about being called dude or bro.

For the former, I’m certainly not going to call you dudette. And it seems widely accepted that dude is gender neutral.

As for bro … I can understand why it bother girls, but I always remember my close friend who says bro so much he frequently uses it even with his wife!!

also lived in the midwest my whole life, mix of rural and cities; this is false

I work with many women, but I don't manage any

I’ll go as far as saying we need legislation to cover this.

I do not like on call. I don’t actually mind the work but I don’t like the entitlement companies have towards it.

On the one hand, sure, I like nice things. On the other, there is legislation to cover this, but you're exempted if you're making typical software engineer salaries (this varies state to state I think, it's not federal, but is fairly common).

I feel like unionization would be a better route to this sort of benefit than trying to get a legislature to pass a bill for a group of people that are already very privileged.

This legislation already exists in other countries. For example Swiss engineers have very specific on call requirements, and their salaries aren’t really less than Americans.

My last company offered me a “promotion” that included more accountability, mentoring young staff and on-call with zero clarity of what that looked like. Zero compensation change.

Needless to say I declined and left soon after.

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