| ▲ | seusscat 2 days 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. |
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| ▲ | BHSPitMonkey 2 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | lolinder 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | 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 2 days ago | parent [-] | | It also becomes a good deterrent against useless requests. You get pinged on Slack at 10pm? Just ask them to file a ticket with a page-worthy severity. When its not nearly as important as that, even external managers will hesitate to do that since they need to explain if the ticket was worth 150% base pay for 3 hours plus the extra PTO next day. Significantly reduces the number of pages. |
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| ▲ | seusscat 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | ndjdjddjsjj 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| 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" |
