Is anyone getting compensated for being on-call? If you are paged and work outside of business hours, do you receive additional compensation?

Google paid SREs 67% their hourly rate for tier 1 oncall outside business hours, regardless of whether they were paged. So 12h shifts on weekends were a full day's pay. Convertible to Off-in-Lieu. I had so many off days. Not sure if it's still the case after those layoffs.

Anyway, I prefer Mon - Thu, Fri - Sun shifts.

Yes. And not only for responding to a page, but also for being stand by outside working hours.

At Google we used to get paid an oncall bonus which was calculated at something like 1/3 your prorated salary for the non-working hours you were oncall (IIRC), up to some limit per quarter. For my team a week of oncall per quarter would max it out and net you a few thousand dollars bonus.

In a previous job yes. 7200DKK per week for on-call. Hours where between 17:00 and 08:00 on weekdays and all of Saturday and Sunday, running Friday to Friday. From 8:00 to 17:00 the normal service desk would handle incidents.

If you got paged you'd get 150% of your hourly pay, per started hour. So if you got pages at 22:00 and again at 3:00 that's three hours of pay, regardless of each issue only taking 5 or 10 minutes to fix.

That's roughly $1000/€950 per week of on-call, plus the hours. You'd have four/five of these per year and you could pick up an extra month of pay per year with the standby pay, plus the hours and maybe pick up another day here and there.

Holidays where normally distributed on a volunteer basis (you'd still get paid, but you opted-in to those days). So maybe I'd be home on New Years, but out on Christmas, so I'd offer to cover Christmas, while another colleague might care more about being able to drink on New Years.

Originally we where almost 50 people handling on-call, so you'd have one week per year, but that's not sustainable, you forget how to handle common issues or how to fill out incident reports and handoff correctly.

The most stupid on-call schedule I ever did was midnight to midnight, every other day... It was only me an my boss. That was incredibly stupid, because you couldn't go out on one day, and the day where you could go out, you had to be careful about having one drink to many.

Yes, 350€ (before taxes of course) per week. No additional compensation for responding/ working on incidents.

I would be interested in how response times are?

Mine is 15mins. So I have to respond and be in a incident call within 15mins.

Not that way around, no -- paying extra when paged creates a perverse incentive. We're paid to make ourselves available, and encouraged to take any time we actually spend working out of hours back in lieu.

My team have put a lot of effort into only rarely being paged: a normal week on-call won't have any out-of-hours activity at all.

We're being compensated for being available (more on weekends and holidays) and get additional compensation for every 30 minutes incident response. Two incidents in one night? Twice the money. Additionally, we are required to work less the next day (we're also required by law to have at least eight hours of free time between two work days. So if you get an incident seven hours after you got off work? Congrats, you now have to wait eight hours before you can start working. This is of course very annoying, so nobody does that)

I'm not even sure if doing on-call duty without compensation is legal in my country.

In the past, there were some cases of "fake" incidents, but the amount of documentation makes sure that the company is able to crack down on this.

In my previous job, the company followed the country's laws pretty much to the letter. Simply being on call gave some small fraction of my "hourly rate" (despite being a full time employee), which actually does add up, since e.g. on a weekend you are accumulating 48 hours of such on call time (while on weekdays it's only 16 per day, as your actual 8 hours worked is not counted twice).

If there was an actual incident, you'd get paid as if that was overtime worked, and it depended on when it occurred (e.g. weekends and public holidays carried a higher than normal multiplier). There were also limits on how much rest you'd need to be guaranteed, etc.

On average, our actual incidents were relatively infrequent, and the pay out mostly depended on the size of the team, which dictated how often you got rotated in. It worked out to something like +10% salary though.

Yes, a flat daily fee during the week, and double that during the weekend or public holidays. Comes to ~600€ per week. If you actually get paged, you automatically get time off for the amount of hours you spent dealing with the incident.

Based on the replies to this I didn't realize how bad we have it in South Africa. I was on call 24x7 for 2 years and was not paid anything for it.

Big ecommerce companies and even global brands like AWS and BMW require 24x7 on call without any compensation.

At my last job I got time off in lieu for actual hours worked + about $4/hour for being on-call.

I really wish we'd gotten paid for hours worked rather than TOIL, not for personal preference but because it would have aligned the company's incentives better. We might actually have fixed some of the problems if not doing so cost the business a tangible sum of money.

Still, it was better than working for free.

I was on-call on a Saturday at the start of November and the prod issue took nearly 10 hours. No extra compensation from my company (not required by law in my country for saturdays but come on!). A week later I had to do it Monday night again, still no extra compensation... I can work less with these extra hours but... when?

Last job I was compensated a flat $450 for being on call 1 week, on top of my salary in the 140K range. Everybody received the same on-call pay and I'm pretty sure salaries were similar but not identical.

At mine: compensated for being on-call, but it's a pittance (in the 100-200 per week range, which is nowhere near being worth it). We get TOIL for time spent responding to incidents.

On my teams, if someone got paged off-hours they would just work less the day after the event. imo it should just be part of the regular salary/work expectations, incentivizing keeping oncall low

I worked at one place that paid an extra $500/week for on-call. That was a flat fee.

Getting paid twice as much and less taxes. But it almost never happens, and I prefer it this way :)

In France it is mandatory either with salary or rest. In addition the labor code stipulates mandatory daily rest of 11 contiguous hours even during the weekend and extra 24 contiguous hours of rest during the weekend. Hours of intervention are considered work.

In my company we get approximately 800€ for every week of on-call and each hour of intervention is also compensated with salary.

From my point of view this should be high enough for the company to be willing to focus on on-call issues. Ater years of being on-call I must admit the salary is comfortable but it doesn't cover the pain and constraints of being on-call: being kinda "stuck" at home basically, lots of consequences on private life etc.