[impostervt]

Awhile back I was on project A that got absorbed by the management of project B. Project b mandated that all engineers wore pagers. A guy on project A decided he didn't want to. The job he was hired for didn't require it when he was hired, and if the pager went off, he'd just have to call someone on project B anyway.

He said no. Got fired.

[coldpie]

Good for that guy, sounds like he got out of a bad place. I'd absolutely quit if someone tried to force me to be on-call without an enormous pay raise (e.g. at least local minimum wage for every hour I have to be responsive to calls, regardless of whether a call actually comes in).

[Fripplebubby]

Maybe I'm naive, but doesn't it depend a lot on the situation? If I'm being told to be on-call for a system I don't know and can't debug, then I would set the expectation that I'm going to reduce my availability for other work while I learn this new-to-me system to the point where I feel confident that I can debug prod issues (to the degree that any of us can debug prod issues, anyway), understand the major risks to that system and common operations, etc. If they say, "sorry, you have to be on-call for this new thing and also keep working 100% on something else", then I fully agree - bad situation, incompetent management, time to go. But needing someone to be on-call for a system isn't a bad sign - in a different viewpoint, it's a good sign that someone is anticipating a future problem and actively planning ahead.

[BrandoElFollito]

Is on-call in your country part of the duties and unpaid? In other words you are expected to possibly work 24h a day while being paid for 8 hours?

[HeyLaughingBoy]

OTOH, I walked into the office at about 9:30AM one day and found a group of people, including the project manager, waiting for me, clearly irritated. PM asked why I didn't respond to my pager (this was about 20 years ago), and I told him that in six months, it had never gone off, so I stopped wearing it. And that was that.

My guess is that they wanted a reason to fire your guy anyway, and he gave them one.

[kcplate]

Must have been quite a while back…