I'm curious, how often are people getting contacted outside of work hours for "regular" jobs?

I do SRE / Platform type of work where I'm technically on-call 24/7/365 but as a salaried worker I don't receive over time or anything like that. If an on-call event happens where I end up putting in 2 hours on a Saturday or Thursday night, I'd use my discretion to leave early or start late another day.

In the roles where on-call was an expectation, it was focused to critical downtime events, not to answer a Slack message from someone working in a different time zone or non-standard schedule. I don't even have work Slack or email on my personal phone. If PagerDuty goes off from a critical alert I get called, that's the only way I get contacted outside of normal hours.

Google pays their oncall a % of their full-time base salary depending on the oncall tier (5 min response time vs 30 minutes).

This should probably be required - there is a different mindset and set of restrictions when you're expected to pick up a page. It also forces companies to use on-call judiciously - not every service needs a 5 min SLO.

> I'm curious, how often are people getting contacted outside of work hours for "regular" jobs?

It’s all over the place. Most of my jobs wouldn’t intentionally contact someone after hours or on weekends unless it was a real emergency or urgency that couldn’t be avoided.

I did work for one company with an executive who liked to work odd hours and demanded responsiveness from everyone. Got so bad that he would regularly be unavailable during the workweek daytime hours but would start tagging people in Slack on Sunday morning or at 9PM. He would threaten to fire people who weren’t responsive enough and I once got threatened for not responding fast enough on vacation. As you might expect, turnover was very high for that company.

More generally there is a problem with people not understanding how communication tools like Slack should be used. I’ve had to teach a lot of non-technical people how to disable push notifications for every message in Slack. They would install the app and start receiving push messages for everything said in all of their channels, then they would think that meant they had to respond to it. You have to set some expectations and communicate what’s expected, otherwise some people will assume every message that appears on their phone is something that needs acknowledgement right away.

It's incredibly common in retail/food service/hopsitality/etc.

Usually about covering shifts.

I'm SRE/Platform, I got paged out last night because Devs apparently can't properly crash applications. Sure, I can move hours as well but my partner doesn't care that I get off at 3 on this Friday instead of 5, she has to work till 5 and my page out interrupted our outing to the movies. Not everyone life is ultra flexible.

You are lucky in that you don’t have the type of employer who needs to be reined in via the law.

There are some true scumbags out there.