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seusscat | 1 year ago

I hate on-call shifts, but if they must exist, I like the way my team handles them. We have split day and night shifts. 7-18 day shift, and 18-07 night shift. All non-work hours compensated with standby at 10% of hourly pay. Any pages outside of work hours earn you an additional 150% in base pay. Each page guarantees a minimum of 3 hours of pay even if you spent only 5 mins on it.

And since in my country, you must gave at least 11 hours between shifts, if you get paged at night, you get PTO for the next 11 hours on top.

discuss

order

BHSPitMonkey|1 year ago

I like the idea of added compensation based on hours covered as it incentivizes the business to avoid very small rotation sizes, but paying extra per page seems like a perverse incentive favoring instability.

lolinder|1 year ago

It depends on who has the largest amount of influence on how noisy the on call is.

If engineers have blanket control to define what is important enough to get interrupted and to prioritize fixing frequent offenders, then sure, it's a perverse incentive.

If, on the other hand, engineering doesn't have very much control over the roadmap and/or isn't allowed to make their own judgment calls about what really matters for pages, then the arrangement that OP describes makes a ton of sense—it gets gets pages onto the budget as a separate line item, which is a good way to get the people who are really in charge on board with investing in permanent fixes.

seusscat|1 year ago

Ehh.. Only pages between 18:00 and 09:00 count for extra pay. Which means it affects your free / personal time. Where I am, the people care a lot about work not intruding on their personal time, so the perverse incentives are reduced.

ndjdjddjsjj|1 year ago

With that setup I'd almost cheer when I get paged. As long as that time off doesn't become "why you now behind on X"