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How Do Companies Pay for "On-Call" Support?
"We have an 'on call pager' that each worker carries for 7 days, about once every 13 weeks, and the pager is only used between the hours of 5PM and 8AM. The person on call gets paid $60 for the week. If paged, and the on call person can walk the user through thier problem over the phone or via remote dialup the on call person gets paid nothing. Regardles of how many times they get paged and can fix the problem over the phone, or via remote dialup, they still get paid nothing. If the on call person has to go on site, they get paid an additional $60. However if they have to go on site more than once, they are limited to only getting the additional $60 once.
Simply put, the call volume will increase dramatically, as well as the after hours work load, but the organization isn't volunteering to pay us more. I'm looking to inform managent that the people who are on call know that the industry pays better than they are getting for the same type of work. So, I'm soliciting to find out exactly what other companies do."
To Whom it May Concern:
You are receiving this e-mail because we regret to inform you that due to lack of staffing we will be unable to attend to your after hours e-mail problem. If this problem persists you may contact the help desk via e-mail at help@mycompany.com between the hours of 8:00am-5:00pm. Please include your department, job title, name, phone number, and e-mail address, network id and a complete description of the problem. We will send you a confirmation e-mail with an anticipated date and time when one of our technicians will be able to assist you in correcting the problem.
Thank you
MyCompany Technical Support Team
First: I am a "union geek" that gets hourly pay (an exception, I realize). I also work in a state university where there are very few 'mission critical' operations that have difficulties after hours, and no-one wears a pager. If they don't get us at home, they call the next one on the list or leave a message on the machine. I get perhaps two calls a month.
Overtime requiring a trip to work is paid at 1.5*salary, with a 3.33 hour minumum (ie 5 hours pay), payable at employee's option of salary or 'comp time'. Phone calls were generally handled casually, very few wrote them up.
Then a particular employee was getting LOTS of calls during a rough software transition period started writing up overtime for phone support, saying he would get it if he came in. And if he got two unrelated calls in a night, he wrote up two five-hour charges. This 'raised the issue', even though he took comp time.
The next time our bargaining unit contract came up, the issue of telephone support was raised, and not just for computer services. The agreement now amounts to "if the call is 15 minutes or less, it is not billable. If it's over 15 minutes, then the pay is 45 minutes or 1.5 * the time spent on the phone, whichever is longer."
This is a two-edged sword, though, because now people are more willing to write up overtime for phone support issues.
Doug
Union this. If they don't give you what you want... quit.
Great. And if no one will hire you at your terms...STARVE!
Afterwards, the night time support cell phone was rotated among the five programmers. No extra pay, just extra work every 5th week. Complaints were brushed off with the "salaried worker" excuse. And besides, we were told it was only "temporary" until new techs were hired. They never were. "Cost effective" I guess.
Well, pardon me for sounding like an arrogant bastard, but users should not have direct access to the programmers. I don't have the ability to bug Bill Gates 24/7 every time Windows GPFs. If fucking (l)users have problems, they need to talk to a dedicated tech support person, who logs and reports the problems. Then management can prioritize problems and assign programming staff to fix things. Yet company policy is to "never anger the user". You know, like saying "no" to them. Fuck that. User scum aren't my boss, they'd better not try to fucking tell me what to do and when to do it. After a while I took the the phone to the boss and said fuck you and your support phone too and walked out.
After I left I kept tabs on what went on. The phone was then given to a programmer one week out of every four now. As I expected, piss off factor grew. Sure enough, one more quit. Now one week in three was hell for the remaining. Then it all snowballed one day and all the programmers quit.
After that I don't know what happened. The company is still there so I guess they hired new staff. My guess is that the same shit will happen all over again. And looking back, it probably happened before too, as a great many programmers names could be found in comments scattered all through the source code comments, now including mine:
A maximum compensation of $120/week with a workload that's likely to cost far more than that if you value the employee's free time at the same rate as (loaded weekly salary / 40) per hour.
I don't know your location, but I'd assume that the above number would usually range from $50 to $150 depending on all the standard salary factors.
This means that the proposed compensation, in return from never knowing whether or not you'll be forced to cancel your plans without any notice, possibly multiple times in a week, would be the same as they're willing to pay for between 45 minutes and 2 and a half hours of your regularly scheduled work time.
Obviously, this isn't very important to the person who is trying to get you to carry the pager. I'd treat it as such. If they insist that e-mail is mission critical, I'd insist that only the e-mail server be considered as such, and agree on software to monitor it for you. At least that way you won't get calls from people who can't figure out how to use Outlook.
--
"Don't trolls get tired?"
Spelling corrections are moderated as "Informative" these days? What on earth are the moderators on...
They're being ripped off.
Our on-call is as follows:
No fee for carrying the phone, but if called, the
rate is person's overtime rate (>US$100) per hour or part thereof.
Hence if a problem takes only five minutes, we still charge an hour.
worldmobilenet.com -- World Prepaid Wireless Internet plans
I don't get anything for being on call.
If something breaks, I have to fix it or I get behind deadline.
I guess that is part of the problem of being your own support.
Others, that I know, have turned off the work cell phones on the weekend because they were getting nothing for being on call.
Be glad your company recognizes it but you should fight for better terms.
-I just work here... how am I supposed to know?
I love responses like this. I am young. I am 22 years old and married. I have a life and I enjoy that life very much. The software that I support is enourmous. I haven't even written 1 percent of it. It is also mission critical for quite a few large name clients (such as kmarts BlueLight.com and Dicks Sporting Goods)
Your last line summarized it, though. I love competition. I want to be the best. I want to propve to people that I can do anything, because I find that fun. Supporting a large piece of mission critical software can be a blast, it is a competition like any other to see how fast you can find the problem and fix it.
--
Mike Mangino
Sr. Software Engineer, SubmitOrder.com
Mike Mangino
mmangino@acm.org
It depends on how you feel about your job. I work for a relative startup (just more than one year old). I am on call 24/7 every third week. I get called about 4 times a week when on call, normally during the middle of the night.
How much do I get paid for this? 0 dollars. I make no extra money when I get paged. I do it because I want the system to work and I want our customers to get their packages as soon as possible.
It amazes me that it is rare to hear people complain about getting paged, even when they get paged 3 times a night (2:00am, 4:00 am and 6:00 am) 6 days during their on call rotation. The company is neat and we like what we do.
In short, if you are dedicated to the company and agree with the job that you are doing, you may not need to be paid extra to carry the pager.
If you are interested in seeing what we do, check out our website
--
Mike Mangino
Sr. Software Engineer, SubmitOrder.com
Mike Mangino
mmangino@acm.org
We have 600+ people, 3 warehouses and 2 call centers. This one is going to make it big.
--
Mike Mangino
Sr. Software Engineer, SubmitOrder.com
Mike Mangino
mmangino@acm.org
Not a bit less. I am paid fair money for what I do, and I expect to be paid more in the future. I am simply saying that being on call is part of the jobs, and we are already being paid to do the job. Maybe I sounded brainwashed and enamored by the prospect, however I understand this is a job, it just happens to be a job I enjoy.
--
Mike Mangino
Sr. Software Engineer, SubmitOrder.com
Mike Mangino
mmangino@acm.org
We are paid a flat sum (£100) a week for simply being 'on call'. This is roughly from 7am to 10pm at night. If we are called out however, and most of our work requires on site visits, we are all paid (no matter what our salery) £12.50 an hour overtime. This works well for me as its a substantial increase over my hourly rate, or even time*1.5.
Waged employees get a bonus of $125/week plus time worked for after-hours work. This can be counted towards overtime once a total of forty hours has been worked.
Salried employees used to be eligble for the $125/week bonus, but this was discontinued about a year ago. No bonus, and no overtime.
I'm not too angry about this, despite being a salaried worker.
--Gus
There are thousands and thousands of high paying interesting IT jobs out there. There's a skills shortage so you *can* just say no. If they insist then resign and get a better job paying 50% more elsewhere.
If you want to do it then insist on double time for on call because after all, it's *your* life that they are taking over.
Deleted
Each application must be owned by a manager who is responsible for delivery, and will be billed at the end of each month for having the staff on call, pager, telephone, and onsite support. The costs will come out of their monthly budget, which they will have to justify to their management. That should cut down on the number of "critical" applications! And, it pays for the support group, which should not be a cost-center, but operate as a profit-center, with product that is "sold" internally.
Ken
To be "on-call" meant carrying a pager. For every 8 on-call hours, I got paid one hour at my regular (salaried) rate. If I had to go to the office, it was an additional $100.
If you were on call 24x7, you got paid for 7 days instead of 5, a big fat 40% bump. People in my group fought to be on-call, we had to have a waiting list to carry the pager.
The pager rarely went off; I would love to have that deal again.
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
I'm on-call for a week at a time, roughly once every 6-8 weeks. I get paid $100 for the week, regardless of whether or not I get paged or have to physically go on-site.
I work for a pretty decent Internet Access company, and am on call two weeks out of the month.
For each day on call, I recieve $15.00 regardless of whether I was paged or not.
I get paid per hour regular rate for any work I need to do while on call if I can do it from home.
If I need to travel at all, I get paid for the miles, and a two hour minimum. So if I travel somewhere, and it takes me 5 minutes to fix, I get paid for 2 hours plus milage. If I work for 3 hours, then I get paid 3 hours.
It's not too bad, considering things work very well around here, and there are hardly any serious problems.
Meep Meep!
I've worked two schemes, the current one is UKP 70 per week, and UKP 10 per call. On-site calls are paid at overtime rate, 1.5x or 2x. The previous system at my last place of work (5 years ago) was, I think, nothing for being on call (it was supposedly included in our salary) and .5 hour at 1.5x for calls before midnight or after 6am, or 2 hrs at 1.5x for calls between midnight and 6am. Additional calls that fell during the time we were being paid for were unpaid in our team, but some other teams didn't enforce this because they got a lot less calls than we did. Sunday calls were x2 instead of x1.5. Salaries were roughly UKP 12k to 24k at the time.
- record +2 hours to every on-call day
- any calls/pages are billed in
.25 hour increments
- you get to count transit time (but, of course, use the best available - you can't walk 60 miles and count it) [I generally just round to "fair" because I always forget to note it when I'm in-transit]
I am personally very happy with this arrangement. But then, I almost never get paged (maybe once a week, max, and I really wish it were more).I have a friend who, upon being paged, charged a 2-hour "base", and then "real time" past the first two hours. and, whenever on pager duty, he billed half-time. An impressive sca^Hheme if you can pull it off.
Send your friends messages of love at fuck-you.org
I run the network area for an insurance company. Technically, I and my staff of four are on call all of the time, but we have practical limits, based on reasonableness. A couple of my workers have expertise in particular areas, so we'll call or page them as needed if after-hours problems occur in those areas. For all practical purposes that's about one or two times a year, though.
Then we have myself and our key network/mainframe guru on Skytel 2-way pagers, which we use to reply by e-mail as needed. We tell people to use the pager email addresses unless e-mail is down. That way we can usually attend to the issue with no phone call or trip required. Also, I get all the alert messages from our anti-virus system mailed to my pager - so it goes off a few times a day (I have a quiet time programmed into it).
When a crisis does happen, I'm first on the notification tree (I'm paid to be the boss, so I better be willing to back it up). If I can, I deal with it myself. If I can't, I call in whoever's appropriate. Basically, this drags in someone at a slightly off-hour a couple of times a year. I do all overnights myself if need be - again, it's a matter of being willing to walk the walk.
Our mainframe programming group (under a different manager) simply has a pager and laptop rotated to the on-call programmer. Each programmer gets a week on rotation where they need to deal with any issues that may arise when our batch jobs run at night. That's typically between 6-11PM. There are 8 programmers on the rotation, so they serve about a week every two months.
Neither of these generate any extra pay (neither for myself or my staff - we're all salaried) - but I give comp time pretty liberally if I have to drag one of my people into the office.
- -Josh Turiel
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
most of the places I've worked at or seen do something like the following:
person on call gets a fixed amount per week (or weekend) usually around $100 flat.
for any calls received, the person gets paid at basically contractor rates for a minimum number of hours. I've often heard $75-$100 per hour for a minimum of 2 to 4 hours.
that said, it's been a few years since i've been on call personally.
-chris
This is for salaried, full time employees. Each tech keeps the pager for an evening (5pm to 8am) on a rotating basis. For each evening they have the pager, they get $100, whether they get 0 calls or 100, and they never visit the site - that's for business hours. The tech on the weekend is on call from 5pm Friday to 8am MOnday, and gets $100 and a comp day.I have worked in several places where this was the method. The company gets 24 hour supports for less than 40k a year, and the techs get some cash and some comp days. Everyone wins.
Any job that expects you to carry a pager for freee, even if you are salary, is bullshitting you. Quit as soon as you can find another job.
What you're talking about is generally considered 'comp time' and according to my now ex-HR department they couldn't do that in the state of California due to conflicting state/federal laws. What we did though is have an unoffical-offical policy that at you could take a 3 day weekend (we rotated Th-Th) at the end of it so you had either Friday or Monday off. This was done under the table so as not to count against vaction/PTO.
I think this policy was actually pretty good (definately a lot better than $60)- if they had enough people qualified to do the rotation I think they would of had much better luck keeping people.
Depending on the number of techies, your pager-duty (which is 24x7) could be every other week or every fourth week. Typically, you work a full day each day for the full week and are also on-call for the entire world, except Asia. You're likely to be paged a few times and as much as a dozen on busy weeks. The average situation can last between an hour and 18 hours. I've been in situations where I worked a full work week, didn't sleep two of the week nights and spent 18 hours on a saturday and another 18 hours the next day (sunday) responding to an on-call page.
We found a web page on our internal servers that claims we're supposed to be paid what would equate to about $300+ per week that we're on call, which would come out to about $600 extra per month for each of us, but when we ask HR about it, they act like they've never heard of such a thing and think we're crazy.
---
seumas.com
I see. So I take it, then, that you expect the company that manufactured your car to fix it under warranty on demand, 24x7? How about the new house you bought?
For anything that the average person purchases, 24x7 support will cost quite a bit extra if it's even available at all. And equipment that you buy for the operation of your company usually requires the purchase of an expensive support contract in order to get 24x7 instant support.
Given all that, why exactly is the stuff you built any different? Are you being paid a whole lot extra to support your stuff 24x7? I suspect not.
I agree that you should do the best you can to build things right. So should the companies that manufacture the things we buy. But just as it's unreasonable to expect the companies that manufacture the things we buy to support their products 24x7 with a (say) 20 minute response time for free, it's also unreasonable to expect a salaried employee to carry a pager to support his systems (software or otherwise) 24x7 without paying him over an above his normal salary.
And before you mention how much such people normally make, keep this in mind: you're not being paid for the 24x7 support. You're being paid to produce a custom application, one that can't be sold in volume. Companies that create low-volume software charge each customer hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars for their software, and often won't even provide 24x7 support for it without an additional service contract.
So why should you be any different, and why should the people that work for you be any different?
--
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
I work for Environment Canada, and I do on-call, and I get paid for it.
The pay works out to 1 hour of time for every 8 hours of standby (i.e. 2 hours a day during the week and three hours a day on the weekend/holiday), plus a _minimum_ of 3 hours at the appropriate overtime rate if we actually get called. That's time and a half or, rarely double time. The typical problem takes about 15-20 minutes to fix, from home. In rare occasions we actually need to get to the office to fix something (in which case we get paid travel costs).
We don't always bill for the trivial stuff, unless it inconveniences us.
c.
Log in or piss off.
Of course, you would want to have folks working staggered shifts, so that the majority of calls can be caught by someone on duty, not the fellow at home with the family...
In the long run, this particular company may wind up saving money - and it will only cost you 1/5 of your average tech support persons salary - and it will be lost time, not increased charges for the company...
Ken
Companies that need 24/7 support for an application, service, system, and so on use this novel concept called a helpdesk. I'm not belittling your question, just pointing out that your company doesn't seem to have a very coherent support structure if the helpdesk wasn't the first thought that crossed their minds. The alternative is really quite expensive -- OT pay for admins is not cheap, losing them is even worse.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
Ahhh,
This is the type of work I handle. In fact, I am actually responsible for handling all alarming in a large worldwide organization.
I have held similiar positions in other companies as well. I can tell you how the big boys typically handle it and possible solutions.
In the companies that I have worked for operations continue 24 hours a day. Having an outage at 3am in the morning is the same as an outage at 2pm in the afternoon in the comapany's viewpoint.
Typically, if there is a high volume of mission critical applications running around the clock changing the support staff to a 24x7 schedule is generally preferred with the two off shifts receiving a 10% pay bonus.
Also, the people working the 24x7 shifts are the front line defense. They are there to deal with user problems, ie tier I and moderate application problems (tier 2) they do not get on-call pay.
Tier 3 people are paid around $12-$20 dollars a shift for being oncall. Not much money, ie for me $192.00 a week, but they seldom get called.
An important note, is that my current company requires employees to be hired temp to perm. Temp employees are paid a minimum of 1 hour of time anytime they are called, ie 3 calls 3 hours billable time.
My preference of course is to have a 24x7 team that can handle most problems so that I rarely get called. I have on-call 2 weeks out of every 6 currently, but have had it for 16 weeks solid in the past.
As for the number of calls you are getting, I have the following suggestions.
Get rid of the customer calls, this is better handled by a help desk. Help desk people are far less expensive than the actual techs working for you.
Build a customer problem website. Create a website that lay's out what to do about frequent problems. Note, this will help a little, but some people refuse to use printed documentation to fix their problems and they will still call. If you are in the business of support though, these customers should not be abused. That's just the way some people are and you are still there to serve the customer. But this website would be helpful to your help desk people as well.
Reduce problems. Currently, I watch over a couple of thousand systems and I have very few problems. Look into automating a lot of the problems that occur. There are several packages out there that let you monitor and take corrective actions automatically so that you just get an email in the morning about all the problems fixed.
I can offer suggestions on how to set up automation to help if you would like.
Hopefully this is of some help. This is the type of environment that I enjoy working in. Most companies are not willing to pay for it.
Lando
PS. If you are going to try to get the company to change it's policies, you will have to collect metrics on the number of problem calls and the amount of time you spend on them.
PSS. Try getting some comp time out of your boss for time spent on work outside of work hours.
/* TODO: Spawn child process, interest child in technology, have child write a new sig */
As salleried employees for my employer, the vast majoirty of their on-call Sys Admins and whatnot get nothing extra monatarilly for being on-call 24/7. Well we get the nifty pagers that give us world news on an hourly basis *smirk* guess we should be happy. The point being, my curiosity as to how many companies compensate at _all_ for this kind of thing. Our job description just says we'll answer the pages, and so we do. We do get some 'extra' benefits that are overlooked for us (long lunches and sometimes long weekends, et al.) but not officially. Overall at points the various people on my team range from content with the unofficial comp-time, to completely irritated that we aren't getting paid for it. Usually most irritated when some consultant comes in at $100+ an hour and racks up the money, whilest we have to be there too and gain nothing. Now, not to make this sound too much like a rant, it's not really, but again, I'm curious how many sys. admin type workers are in this situation, and how many are happy with it. I can also say, that frequently in my case at least that an extra day or two on the weekend (Though I still have to answer pages while out of town) without having to constantly use up my vacation, is well worth the lack of monatary compensation. But others on our team _NEVER_ take long weekends, and certainly should be getting something out of the deal in my opinion. Seems to be a lot of personal preference though.
The word "their" is spelled as I have done, and not as "thier".
-b
Not to be too critical, but you're on-call for four weeks of the year and you get an extra $60 a week whether you get a call or not, and possibly an extra $120 if you go on site.
Whilst $60 may not be a lot, the on call component of your job isn't much of an extra load if you're only doing it for four weeks in the year.
You either want the job or you don't.
'sapientia potestas est'
FedEx pays a flat rate for the time you're on-call whether you get paged or not (how much varies with different positions, but generally is higher than the $60 you mentioned), *AND* pays you your full "hourly rate" for any time you actually get called.
I put "hourly rate" in quotes because most people in on-call positions are salaried.
-
A subject near and dear to my heart. I am a salaried employee supporting an e-commerce app. Unfortunately there are only 2 of us on the support team, so we switch off every other week. We get paid 15% over our base salary for being on call all of those hours. The pay is nice, but we have to be near a dial up connection all the time, so no camping, no bars for that week - our service agreement says 15 minute response time. Not really worth it if you ask me.
Scuttlemonkey is a troll
Do you work for a non-union hospital?
In my experience working in a union hospital, there was something that every PHB understood -- Someone carries a pager, they get paid per hour the pager is on. Someone works overtime, they get time-n-a-half. Someone gets called in when they were off, they get paid for 4 hours minimum.
This was on the health care side, so if your hospital is union, perhaps the bosses understand the situation all to well, and are perfectly happy to abuse the non-unionized techies. Usually, it's just too difficult for management to treat a small number of employees as a special case. Simple solution? Have the techies vote to join one of the hospital's unions.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
There are a lot of good answers to your question, from people who are experienced with similar setups. While other new "needs" will come up, and your question will require answering now or later, I have a question I'd like to ask...
Why would you call someone to fix your email after hours?? The only reason I can think of is that you have some urgent message to send ASAP. So you call a technician? Why not just call the person you needed to get the message to? Wouldn't that be faster for everyone?
I don't know what others out there are getting, however the company that I just left has this plan:
$2.00 per hour just for carrying the pager
1.5X base rate for answering a call - Base rate being Salary / 2048
4 hours mininium for an answered call, no more than 8 hours a night for overtime, so no 3 calls=12 hours
If I was scheduled to leave the office at 5.00pm, and got a page at 5:01 it counted as an after hours page and I got the 4 hours
They were pretty cool, I just didn't get to write code there
They charge by the hour. If it turns out costing too much, that means something needs revamped.
It's the latter that I was referring to. It appears, from the poster's description, that he knows the email system is unreliable, or has end-users who use support for questions best answered by referring to documentation. Also, I'd assume, this situation is beyond his direct control (ie: Management chose the email system and user training). In which case, my statement is still true - no matter how good a job he does, he'll still get the same number of pages due to those issues outside his realm of authority.
Rest assured, I did give my previous employer a chance to fix my situation before leaving. I asked for a simple promotion, in order to qualify for a higher salary which would compensate me for the additional workload. My manager declined, giving me some BS line about waiting a few more months... Right! One of the biggest pleasures of my career was announcing my resignation in a project meeting completely spur of the moment. I had nothing planned, no new job to start, just simply "enough". When asked where I was going next, my reply of "Not sure, haven't got to that detail yet!" was met with the most blank stare I've ever seen! hehe
But back on topic, I can agree that if you create something you should feel compelled to stand by it. I don't feel, however, that it's proper for an employer who doesn't give an IT Admin the authority to implement a robust system, complete with failover and redundency - along with a help desk to filter real IT problems from end user questions, the mandate to support the inferior system 24/7 without appropriate compensation.
Bottom line - if the CFO chose the crappy email system, let him/her get paged at 2am when the system barfs! When I come in the next morning, I'll remind once again why using Product ZYX like I had recommended would have let them sleep as soundly as I did.
I AM, therefore I THINK!
Just because the email system may have failures 20 times a week does not necessarily mean the email admin is not doing thier job! The Company as a whole is responsible for that system. If someone up top decided a robust, stable system is too expensive - and purchases instead an instable one, that's the Company's fault - not mine!
I've worked in the past for a rather large company which had a subsidiary purchase a low-end, untested in large-scale environments, instable transaction processing system. It was then my job as the IT person to support it. This thing was a total piece of crap! I recommended multiple architectural changes to it to stabilize it and the vendor who developed it would shoot the idea down. Management sided with the vendor, after all - it was his system, not mine!
You can't possibly tell me that the above situation is an issue with me not doing my job correctly! After 3 months of that crap, I quit in frustration!
I don't care what hospital resident's work, that's not my business. If they're getting screwed, it's up to them to fix things. I'm not going to accept some other industry's curse being placed upon me for the simple reason that they accept it - so I must too.
Finally, if you were stupid enough to provide pager duty during your honeymoon - you deserve the divorce you're probably headed for.
There is a quote I've heard, and vehemently adhere to, although I don't know the originator to give proper credit...
I work to live, not live to work
I AM, therefore I THINK!
I work for a smallish department in a large academic institution. I am in a salary position and I am not directly compensated for my time on call. Though, if I am called in for three hours, that is three hours I can take off some other time.
A coworker of mine is paid by the hour. When he is on call, he is paid $2.00/hour just to be on call. If he is called in, he gets paid a two hour minimum for each call. If the call exceeds two hours, he gets paid his normal hourly rate for everything beyond that.
Moneywise, we end up making about the same.
If your management isn't receptive enough to make a change in policy to compensate you fairly for this PITA job (i had to wear a pager for several months- fortunately didn't have to respond to it much), then I'd say you should find a way to get out of pager duties entirely or find a different place to work. One that'll pay you what you're worth.
(but is any amount of money worth giving up hours of precious sleep/coding time/bedtime-fun to step a user through making Lookout2k work at 11pm?)
I am swedish and I work in Sweden. Neither my employer nor I am affiliated with any union. My deal for taking customer calls on evenings and weekends is that if I get called at all I get one day off the next week for each call.
I am swedish and I work in Sweden. Neither my employer nor I am affiliated with any union. My deal for taking customer calls on evenings and weekends is that if I get called at all I get one day off the next week for each call.
Oh, and I'm being payed for those days off. That means that I get 8 hours of salary for every call, plus normal salary for the time I spend taking the calls and handling the reported problems on nights and weekends.
I've worked for a number of newspapers in systems support. At all of them, I've been on call 24/7. In the past eight years, there hasn't been a single time that I didn't carry a pager. That include weekends, vacations and my honeymooon. During the day, I carry a two-way radio and most of the time I've got a cell phone. That's the nature of the beast.
I see the above as part of my job. The better I do my job, the fewer pages I get. When systems I'm responsible for break, it is my responsibility to fix them. Period. If I'm doing my job right, my after-hours calls are few and far between.
If you expect your mail server (Exchange, right? {grin}) to break 20 to 30 times a week, you are not doing your job. Your system is unstable. Your procedures are flawed. Your operators (or whatever group handles daily maintenance) are poorly trained. Something is horribly wrong. That is your problem. Not the on-call schedule's.
If you want to look at worker abuse, look not at the IT workers in your hospital, look at the residents. It's not uncommon for residents to work 80 hours or more a week. My aunt, a nurse, tells me that 20-hour shifts are expected. It's part of joining the Club Doctor.
InitZero
What's more important to you....cash or free time. Cash will NOT bring back your weekend.
I worked for a company that supported a major airline. Our SLA's were at least a decade old (mainframe days), but the customer expected us to uphold the SLA with newer, more complex systems. Did anyone else here go through GBIC hell on the old photon disk arrays? The company skimpped on high availability h/w, and had us by the throat with that outdated SLA.
Made for some long nights when you have to have 24X7 on faulty h/w. Made for a great many lost weekends.
It was the fault of MY management for not updating those SLA's. If you have it in your power to get an agreement signed, DO IT! It will be an uphill battle if you are already supporting a system, because people resist change, but you will be very thankful for putting the effort in.
Vacation: what most IT people get in the form of a check at the end of the year.
If you feel like your employer is exploiting you, then you might want to consider forming a union at your workplace. Even if you feel that you're paid sufficiently well, if you're subjected to unreasonable conditions and talking with management isn't fixing things, you may want to get someone to do the talking for you.
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In the company that I work for the managers are copied on all pages.
This is easy to do in our environment because the pages are generated by a trouble ticket system.
People are text paged on high or critical tickets. Managers are copied on all pages to people beneath them. Add it all up and yes, the CEO gets paged every couple of hours.
Paging the manager every time a tech gets paged is a great way to make sure that management is aware of the on-call work load.
Chris
-- I need more coffee. It's Monday. There is no such thing as enough coffee on a Monday.
Not always true, where I work, when we are hired we are told that we will have on-call time. Our salaries are higher than usual though, and we have set limits to what can be called-in.
Desktop issues are 8:30am to 5:30pm, period. If you have a desktop issue, that will not get handled by on-call. We have 24/7 Computer Operations (They get paid hourly), and they deal with most of the nightly issues, however if there is a problem with backups then someone is called. Or if one of the 24/7 websites is down.
However, when I started managing the Server teams I insisted on improved equipment for backups (AIT2 Libraries) and web servers (Clusters). This has GREATLY reduced the number of calls we receive. Plus, since we have extra equipment we can set limits to how many failures we have before we get called.
If we lose one tape drive, or one web server from a cluster, we get notified in the morning.
The only problem with this is, that by the time we get called, it's going to be something that requires us going in.
Depending on which team it is, it's generally 2 weeks on, 4 to 8 weeks off. When you are on-call you MUST be available, if not you must notify Computer Operations that you are out-of-area (Hey, emergencies happen), and I'm secondary on-call for all systems.
-- Keith Moore
This sig is the express property of someone.
I did forget one thing, If you have to come in (regardless of how long), or if you have to spend 4+ hours on-line off-hours, you get a comp-day. This allows you to actually get to see your family if you get stuck working all night.
-- Keith Moore
This sig is the express property of someone.
Every hospital I've worked for pays nurses, x-ray techs, ultrasound techs, and sometimes physicians for on-call services. My suggestion is to find out how your hospital deals with its nurses and ask for the same.
(BTW: from what I've seen, a typical arrangement is to pay an hourly rate for the call plus a two-hour minimum at overtime rates if the employee has to come in. OTOH I was an administrator-on-call for years and never got a penny.)
In defense of Slashdotters, it's not that we're male and not very gender-aware, it's that we're single and don't have any kids. Now that the issue's been pointed out to me, I have to think that any parent, male or female, would have something to say about being on-call.
--
--
Do I look like I speak for my employer?
Ahh.. but the difference is that, if you happen to be not home, not available, or drunk... you don't get fired.
When you are paid to be on-call, you *MUST* be available.
The on-call employee should be paid all of the following:
a) An on-call fee that is reasonable. This need only be a fraction of their daily salary as if they are working, however, $60/week is rediculously low. Usually $50/day or something (provided the employee generally makes say, $150/day on a working day).
b) Time spent doing actual support should be paid at full wages, regardless of whether a trip in to the office is required or not. The 'on-call' fee is not supposed to compensate you for actual work done, only for keeping yourself available.
c) If you do have to go in, not only should wages be paid for work, but for the time driving to and from the site to solve the problem.
In short.. on-call fee is paid so that your time can become 'their time' on a moments notice. You give up some freedom in exchange for a fee.
If they decide to take that freedom and have you work, they shoudl pay you for it.
Well duh, and that's one of those things that can't just wait until in the morning. Several posts here mention the fact that it's not a clear cut answer. If I were in that situation, sure, that's not something that would wait and I'd be expecting myself and anyone else that worked that type of position to be on the ball.
Call the state and see if they have someone that can help you. Here it is called the 'Employment Relations Division'(?).
They can tell you what the law is, so you may actually be legally entitled to more than you are making (backpay and all). If being oncall restricts your mobility (ie, you can't go hiking in the woods), then here in MT you need to be compensated for that time. If you have to work when on call, that needs to be paid at an hourly rate.
Now if your salary or wage isn't really worth providing 24/7 support, then you will need to talk to your employer and work out a more adequate bit, but it sounds like you probably have some labor laws backing you up.
In any question about this, check the law books. Sometimes you will be pleasantly surprised at what is on the books.
Call it stupid, but I dont primarily work for a pay. I work because I like what I'm doing.
To me, having to go in sometime at odd hours is not a burden.
I dont say I'd go in and work 20 hours shift every day, but considering the pay check I get every two weeks, they're certainly entitled to a few hours of my precious sleep.
Even if I was paid less then I am, I'd go in occasionaly anyways. Reason: I'm proud of my boxes, and I like it when they run well.
I've quit a very good job to move where I'm at now, just to follow a boss that knew the difference between a system admin. and a slave.
If I get to work a 20 hours straight, they expect me _NOT_ to come in the next day. No questions asked. I need a day off, I can take it, No questions asked. I need to leave half-in to the day ? No questions asked. They give me headroom, because I give them headroom. We're an alarm company with over 100K customers. This is what 24/7 is all about, and having a Sun enterprise barfing on you, is not something that can wait till the next day. Granted, it does not happen regularly. But since we're 24/7, e-mail gets used around the clock, and is considered critical. If it's not critical, we dont run it, period. All our systems have a need for 24/7 uptime (and that's including the NT boxes.). We're a very low-staffed department, all salaried, so we can kiss OT goodbye. But as I said higher, we get _very_ flexible schedule and a nice pay/advantage package, and this makes up for all the odd hours we put in.
Marriage is considered capital punishment for the theft of a goat in some third world countries...
I think its important to make a distinction in the type of "on-call" support they are providing, and what 24x7 really means.
Are "On-call" support pages system-down emergencies? For those types of pages (usually generated from a system monitoring package) I totally agree with you. I make myself available for pages all waking hours every week to field those problems, and pride myself on quality work which keeps them from happening.
However, I belive the original post was referring to user requests ("how do I open this attachment..." type of questions.) On these types of calls I refuse to be on call. Let it wait until morning, or buy a book.
Its also important to think about what 24x7 means. In my line of business 24x7 means just that, not 24x7 until the tech goes to bed at 1 AM. Sleepless nights are something to be compensated for by regular salary (for night shift workers) or 1.5x salary for daytime workers.
IME I've seen one fairly "standard" practice.
1) On call you receive 1 hour of pay for every 4 hours on call.
2) If a call occurs you are paid 1 hour of pay for every hour worked.
This also seems fair and equitable to both parties (having disgruntled employees on call isn't fun for anyone).
-eric
I worked in IS at a hospital for three years. The best way to combat every system being named "mission critical" is to demand the same benefits and pay as other hospital 24x7 on-call personnel such as doctors and nurses and their direct support staff.
You will likely see a drop-off in so-called "mission critical" systems as the cost of supporting these mission critical systems goes up.
Email isn't mission critical: treating patients is mission critical. Admitting them is secondary, and billing them is probably a close third. Email? Yeah, right.. But I'm preaching to the choir.
(I wouldn't expect your email infrastructure to be so troublesome that it would cause 20-30 calls/week, though!)
The Good points: for each call you received 3 hours of overtime, but any calls you took in that time period were considered part of that call. Any additional calls after the 3 hours was an additional 3 hours. So if you recieved two calls an hour apart you got 3 hours of overtime. If you received two calls four hours apart you received six hours of overtime. If you got stuck or didn't know how to fix it you called the bosses. They always knew how to fix it. Literally
The Bad Points: No-one in the IT depatment was except. This included webmasters, database programmers, tech, and admins.
This was bad for two reasons. If something came up and they knew how two fix it, no problem. However 80% of the calls had to either be addressed by one of the techs or one of the admins. Since I was the 1)senior tech 2)lived nearby I answered a lot of thos calls... even when it wasn't my week.
the second way it was bad is that 2/3 of the staff was saleried. No overtime at all. Needless to say they were not chipper when their week rolled around.
*A)bort, R)etry, I)nfluence with large hammer.*
My company pays quite well.
2 2 =$951.93/week.
For every call, you get paid 1.5x your "hourly salary". All calls are considered a minimum of one hour. If you get called three times in the same hour, you get paid for three hours worth of overtime. All calls over one hour are rounded up to the nearest 15 minutes.
So, if I make $60,000/yr, and I get 22 calls during the week, I would make:
60000/2080=$28.85.
$28.85*1.5=$43.27.
$43.27*
We feel that it is a pretty fair amount of money. (I'm a Solaris sysadmin)
I work for as a Unix Admin at a large IT company. After hours support (in my area of the company) is maintained on a volunteer basis. The on-call person carries a pager three weeks out of the quarter on average. They are compensated based on the actual number of hours in the month (outside the normal 8-5) that they have to wear it. The extra pay then ranges from 5-15% (based on their normal monthly salary) depending on the amount of time spent. This is whether or not a call comes in.
I suspect it's more true than a joke in most companies.
When I was hired to my current job I was doing every other week on call, with a bunch of crappy apps on 150 poorly configured NT servers in distant locations on slow links. Oncall was a nightmare. I got paid no extra for the odd hours of the night at which Dr. Watson would decide to Dr. Watson.
Then the extremely controlling senior tech (hi, Mike!) quit. Within weeks I was down to on call one week in thirteen, and instead of first level I was down to second level, and in some cases third level. Of course, I still don't get paid any extra.
To answer the question (in a pathetic attempt to get back on topic): get some quotes from third party companies to do the additional support you require. That gives you a figure to base your extra compensation on. I would recommend a fixed extra amount for oncall weeks, rather than trying anything per-incident, as the more complex you make your scheme the more loopholes there will be in it. I've seen companies where a pager would go off and half the department would get in their cars to drive to the office for the "having to go in" bonus.
As long as the problems are getting fixed (and you should make sure they are) it is in your interests to have them fixed from home. They get fixed quicker that way.
--
--
E_NOSIG
That's great if you work in the private sector for a 9-5 company.
-But mission critical hospital systems are completely different.
Would you want to be lying in bed and the doc can't get your results because the tech decided
"There are some things that will simply wait until the next business day..."??
Nope...Nobody else wants that either...
I also work in hospital IT, although I got off the on-call rotation. (Thank God)
We were 24/7 salary - no paid on-call time. What I was taking issue with was the idea that "salary" should constitute "watching the clock".
Email is not, IMO a mission-critical system, but if management decides that it is - I will come in just the same and work just as hard to fix the problem.
Simply saying "Some things can wait" is not always the answer.
And not being a clinician, I may not always be justified in expressing my opinions by not acting on a problem.
What needs to be reviewed is the compensation, if management will not review the policy.
- Hourly pay for carrying the pager/phone (eg 1 for 8 or 1 for 4)
- Hourly pay for working any calls that come in
- ...preferably with a 2 or 4 hour minimum each time a call is received
- ...all times a multiplier if it's a holiday
If you get 1-for-8 to carry a pager during non-working hours, a week of carrying (including 1 weekend but no calls) is 16 hours of pay, which is a 40% increase in gross pay. If you're called that just goes up.And in return you set response expectations like:
I had the same issues with on-call and more importantly weekend work. After a few months of politely saying it was bothering me I 'told' (did not ask) my managers that since I worked the whole weekend I would be taking monday and tuesday off as well as ALL monday's and Tuesday's off after being required to work a weekend.
Oh crap! were they up in arms. *grin* "What are we going to do on Monday and Tuesday when you are gone?"
I basically said that it was thier descision to have me work the weekend so I assume that the weekend work was more important than my normal weekday work and they will have to figure out what to do. And "No" I will not be on-call on monday's or Tuesday's.
I feel no sympathy for companies who attempt to give more work to the existing staff instead of hiring enough people to do the job.
Just stand your ground, do what you like, and let the chips fall where they may. The job market is so tight you can probably find a better job in a week anyway.
In plain talk, if the clue-by-four doesn't work, find another job and let it be their problem.
--The basis of all love is respect
In a former position, we rotated on-call support for the application we supported between the two support people on a weekly basis. We both had dial in access to the system and were paid overtime (minimum of one hour) for each incident that could be solved from offsite and for any incident that required an office visit, we were paid for a minimum of four hours.
You make me jealous... money isn't everything, but in this case it's at least a start.
I work for an ISP (one of the largest privately-held ones in the US) and provide on-call support for all issues (servers + networks) one out of every four weeks, and support for my particular skillset (UNIX server administration) another of those four weeks. And there's nothing stopping the lower tier from calling me at any hour the rest of the time if somebody thinks I'm the only person who can solve a particular problem (which is frequently true - we're horribly understaffed). The on-call person is not supposed to have to deal with non-critical issues - that is, issues not affecting multiple users - after hours, but that doesn't stop the escallation team from calling anyway sometimes. By the time I find out it's one luser who can't (do what-the-fsck-ever), the damage is done, and a night of restful, uninterrupted sleep is ruined.
I am salaried, and receive no bonuses or compensations whatsoever.
Bitter? Fsck, yeah. I hate it. I have had enough of it, and am actively seeking a new job.
This is very typical of my company - expecting the extra mile from employees, but never throwing them so much as a bone. Whether such treatment is due to apathy or a genuine lack of funds, I don't know, but neither is an adequate excuse. I make a decent salary, based on a 40-hr work week (ha!). It looks kinda sad at 60-hrs, and after that, well, McDonald's pays rather competitively. I like to run a smooth system, I work hard, I'm thorough, and I like to see problems fixed correctly and expediently, but lately the satisfaction of a job-well-done is just not making up for the effort it takes. It's hard to give a crap about your company when it clearly doesn't give a crap about you.
24/7 support should be provided by a 24/7 staff, in my oh-so-humble opinion. Expecting the dogs who already work 60-80 hour weeks to pick up the phone and fix crap in the middle of the night is downright greedy and inconsiderate. If you can't afford to staff 24/7, then maybe your perception of how your company is operating needs some adjustment.
</rant>
And what's more, the fact that the ALT text in the broken banner link at the top of my browser reads "We're the dot in
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I currently work for a rather large IT organisation (65,000 employees) and I'm currently rostered on-call for several systems I support.
My division is a result of a recent aquisition of a smaller company (1500 employees) at which we used to receive 10% of our standard hourly wage for every hour on call (that is, without even being called out). This amounted to 12.8hrs/wk extra pay.
If we were called out, we would get paid for a minimum of 4 hours work at time-and-a-half on weekdays and double-time on weekends.
It was a rather good deal!
Since the aquisition, we now get paid $300/wk to be on call and a minimum of 1 hr per a callout at standard rate weekdays and time-and-a-half on weekends.
We typically go on-call for two weeks at a time and cycle amongst 3 people.
Where I work, people who are on-call get a 10% bonus, plus $180 ($60 for Saturday and $120 for Sunday) for the week. If they're actually called, and end up spending a significant amount of time on it, they can get comp time as well. That said, we charge for 24x7 support, so what the on-call personnel are being paid is a small fraction of what is being brought in by providing it.
OK,
I'm a programmer (Boo Hiss). Our HELP desk? You mean the ones that won't WON'T look at a help procedure? There is the slightest problem, they call us (Right down to resetting passwords). Their excuse? "I couldn't figure it out", or "The program wan't installed on my support PC"
The one that drove US nuts though was when the night LAN crew started reprogramming routers (without telling us), and DENIED it. A who segment's worth of users would call "We can't access the Database", but everyone else in the company was up. We check the router, and sure enough, there was a problem. An hour or so later it would go away. Next morning, we'd talk to the head LAN admin, and he'd say "We didn't have any problems, and nothing was done" - This went on for over a month. We finally set up our own logger. It seems that some night tech was doing it on his own, and when his boss asked, was saying "I didn't do anything"
AAARRRGGGHHHHH
Sorry for the vent, but 30 straight days of 2x/night calls sticks with you, even months later
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
First off, you have to determine how much coverage you need. If you're getting more than 1-3 calls per night, you need to eliminate some useless calls or (if they're all real) hire off-hours support people for 3rd and/or 2nd shift.
Next, you need to figure out a way to compensate people for the extra time. One tactic that works quite well is to establish service levels and testing to monitor the service levels (e.g. you can monitor system uptime and then require that the system be up 99.8% of the time).
Once you have that in place, I recommend a quarterly bonus structure based on meeting the service levels. You get to answer questions like: how much? Do you pay for partial success? How do you measure things like "customer experience" and what constitutes downtime?
If person A is looking after their sick daughter, then it makes no difference if it's Alice or Alex, they have equal requirements. Similiarly if person B spends all their nights watching who wants to be a millionaire, it makes no difference if it's Betty or Brian.
However, I'd say that in most circumstances there should be no special consideration for family responsibilities. Anyone is entitiled to take a bit of time off, someone might be getting a new fridge delivered, someone else might be taking his daughter to the hospital. However, if the amount of time off gets exessive, it impacts their ability to do the job, and starts unfairly impacting their co-workers.
Large corporate.
We used to have 2 rates which projects could choose, with different 'time to respond' and 'time to fix' times. Both were worked as 1-week-in-4 rotas, with pay dependent on whether you had to attend in person, the length of the callout (in a half-dozen bands or so) and whether it was unsociable hours (weekends, holidays). Both also paid a retainer independent of whether you were actually called out.
The system DID NOT WORK. People took on multiple rotas (not allowed - can you really provide emergency support in 2 places at once?), claimed for attendance when they dialled in, and didn't meet the tight targets imposed by the higher rate.
Now we have a single on call arrangement. Still 1 in 4, with an intermediate retainer, time to respond (to a pager, 30min?), time to fix (2hrs before fault escalates IIRC), a reduced number of call time bands (3 I think), identical rates whether you attend in person or not (more realistic now we can all dial in), unsociable hours still count.
Things do seem a little happier and more honest now, especially as the rates were not averaged but were put in as part of an inflationary adjustment, so they're closer to the old high-paying rate.
Our rates are actually fairly generous (now - they werent before) - the retainer and a few calls can easily add up to 15-20% of your pay - but we do have substantial out of hours support anyway so on-call only really happens when the shit really hits the fan.
The high cost of on-call rotas is passed on directly to the projects who ask for it, which tends to keep the number of rotas down. You can't just ask to get put on call.
Yep, that system completely sucks. Yes, it's probably quite a bit of a "I had to do my time, now so should you." (kind like learning Scheme, IMHO). But you probably knew that going in, and once you're through the intern phase you'll never do it again.
Saying that you HAVE to go through that (and you don't....if you're a competant programmer you could do that for a living and make a quite nice salary) and that others should grow up isn't quite fair. If they all of a sudden told you, mid-way through your internship, that you'd have to start staying up every 4th night, you'd probably fight back quite seriously.
Explain to them that your people aren't robots/computers, and you can't just add load to them without changing something. Tell them that if they institute this policy, people WILL quit, and the cost of replacing them will be prohibitive.
But perhaps you should phrase it in an analogy that they can understand. Let's say that they have 100 beds in the hospital. Let's say that it's a VERY well-run hospital and they're running a 90% utilization rate. The hospital only covers non-emergency care (i.e. no Trauma ward in the ER). Now the hospital wants to start taking Trauma cases. Maybe the ER itself can handle it, but they probably don't have enough beds for the additional load. They probably don't have enough nurses, additional doctors, etc.
They can't make the decision to take trauma cases just based on the ER....they have to look at the WHOLE hospital's ability to handle the increased load.
The issue with additional 24-7 support of email is very similar. They can say that they're going to do it, but without providing additional resources, it can't actually be done. If they want to offer trauma care, they have to be able to handle the whole thing, add additional beds, nurses, etc. This is the same thing.
The problem is that the people you're dealing with probably don't understand it on the same level. They just think of services, and think that they can just add them for free.
The most difficult thing to do, but probably the correct one, is to have the person running the on-call program categorically refuse to do it. If you stand together, unless they just fire the lot of you (which they KNOW they won't do) you've got a lot of leverage there.
Make your best case. Speak logically, use analogies, use numbers. When all else fails, make blatant, explicit ultimatums and refusals. You wouldn't tell them how to run medical care, they shouldn't tell you how to run a support centre.
We are paid 100$ a week to carry our cell phone
at all times. In my group we are on call once every 5 weeks for the week 5pm to 8am. Normally
you never get called unless you are on call. But
managment still wants the ability to get in touch with us 24/7. If we can solve the problem over the phone then we dont get anything extra. If we need to come into the office to fix an issue while on call or have to come in to do maintence then we are paid 300$ each time.
Its not a whole let but it makes dealing with on call a little bit nicer.
Malice95
When i worked for a local university we were on call for a week at a time on about a 2 month rotation. Between 5pm and 8am on the weekdays we
received 90 cents an hour for being on call. On weekend we were paid the full 24 hours. This worked out to about $100 in our paychecks. Now i've gone private sector and again i'm on call.
Now i get paid nothing for being on call. Seems rather rediculous that we are required to be in town and available for a week and are not compensated in any way.
Where I work, (large library mfg) we have a relatively decent arrangement worked out. For every shift (standard 8-hrs) that I carry a pager, I get about half an hour's worth of pay. So I get an hour per weekday and an hour and a half per weekend day.
;-)
Any time spent on calls is charged normally, which usually results in it being paid as overtime, but even the salaried guys get straight time above their base for it.
It's worked well for the last several years, and I haven't ever heard any real complaints about the system, just the accounting weenies that can't figure it out. Oh well...
=Alert. Alert. Please step away from the sig line.=
-RobHood
I'm not an anti-{insert OS} zealot. I just like blowing people's little minds.
And for this you are paid.... $50k/yr? $75k/yr? $100k/yr? What?
The question of whether or not someone is being exploited rather depends on how much they're being paid, doesn't it?
-*- Any technology indistinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced -*-
"//I quit because I'm a programmer, not a fucking tech support flunkee. Beware the after hours cell phone."
Don't guess you ever heard of being a team player. Our development group and tech support group at least try to work together. I'm not saying it is perfect, but language like yours just sets a department up for failure.
1. What do the doctors/interns/other key medical staff get paid (not the actual amount, but the relation to their normal salary) for being on call?
1a. Can that scale then be used to determine a fair pay scale for the IT workeres?
2. Do you have a trouble ticket tracking system that can mark the start of ticket so that you can track the actual time spent on an issue?
3. If so, can you show management exactly how much time is spent on issues of different types and of different levels of importance?
Finally, not to be rude about it, but you do work in the health care industry - namely for a non-profit health care institution. Isn't there some level of professional and/or professional sacrifice expected in this situation?
Perhaps a reevaluation of the way IT candidates are informed when they are hired should be implemented so that they realize that there is a different level of sacrifice needed to work in a non-profit health care facility that is a little different than in the private sector.
Yea no doubt I know it was at my last company they all bitched and complained but no one ever did anything about it as we were all salary and wre just supposed to live with it as if systems weren't up then people were n't making sales and it would hurt our bonus that wasn;t entirely dependent on what we did but the powers that be above us has some sort of pact.
There's also a particular function I perform (DNS) as part of the overall Unix sysadmin job that requires a couple of quick five minute, "Let me grab the laptop and put that in for you," calls each week if the second-tier support guys forget to do proper planning, or a customer springs changes on them at the last minute.
I avoid having the problem of people calling by thinking about the importance of uptime and it's direct relationship with my sleep and ultimately my sanity, when setting up critical systems.
Proper Prior Planning Prevents Piss-Poor Performance -- cliche' but it works.
Being on call 24/7 for seven years started as a willingness to help out as only one of two technicians at a site for a previous employer. I wanted people to see me (the new junior tech at the time) as "helpful".
Add a little bit of the old clue-bat to the picture to the willingness to give up some personal freedom and "life" to the company (or as I like to see it, to the people who really needed my help), and all of a sudden I'm the "go to" guy for many things at the office during normal business hours!
Totally by accident, I ended up with two promotions and quite a bit more money. I guess upper management there also had a firm grip on the clue-bat. WHAP WHAP WHAP... "Hey you guys, see that guy willing to help out? Sure he's getting a few pages at night, but he's also making double your salary now... and no, there's still no extra pay, per se, for carrying pagers."
And I'd have to say that in my current position, I'm now completely acclimatized to having the pager (well, e-mail to the cell phone and the phone itself paid for by the company) attached to my hip 24/7. The job, the pay, the opportunities for advancement -- all from a general willingness to just get things done day or night.
Maybe this is old news for many doing the work out there who read /. -- I hope the new guys with the shiny new Certifications and no experience are listening.
Find a manager clueful enough to recognize hard work and make them look good while getting important things done. Simplicity in and of itself, but not the simplest task in the world!
Stop worrying about what you'll get paid and get things done. The money will come. If it doesn't -- or you can't live on the salary -- leave and find someone who has a need for a clueful and willing techie.
There's no reason someone willing to work hard in IT should be hard-up for a reasonable paycheck. And whining about being on-call isn't going to help in a scenario where you're not getting "paid enough" to be on-call. That's either your own bad attitude showing or your company's unwillingness to pay appropriately for the job.
+++OK ATH
A former, nameless employer dealt with our on-call issues thusly...
:)
We were paid overtime (of a sort) for hours worked above and beyond 40 hours in a week. "Sort of" means that we were paid on a sliding scale figured like this:
H/W/2 = weekly salary
H == hours per week
W == wages for the week
2 == yup, divided in half
in effect, a person who makes $800 per week in base salary and works 10 hours of overtime makes a total of $880 (or, each overtime is worth $8 using the above formula).
what this meant is that, in the case of relatively minor overtime, we were compensated fairly well. but, in clusterf**k weeks, we were screwed. it was a compromise. the company didn't want to pay more, but we weren't willing to offer 24/7 support for free (they didn't believe in comp time, either).
in fact, we called it "insult time", but to be fair, we were happy to get something whereas most support-types got zilch for extra hours.
the strings attached were thus. we were classed in federal terms as "technicians", not "professionals". according to federal law, we had to have a "clear and mutual understanding between employer and employee" that we were not required to work a 40-hour week if there weren't support issues. and, we were not allowed to have regular, recurring duties (swapping tapes).
the meter begain ticking on the insult time clock the minute a page arrived, so we were paid for any time it took to get from wherever we were to the office.
of course, my former employer absolutely expected me to work 40 hours a week and perform recurring tasks, despite what the feds said
and i'm not suggesting this as a model of some sort. but, afaik, this special classing was created by the feds specifically for us poor techies who work 80 hours a week when things break (and 79.5 when things don't). hope it's helpful.
- j
I don't get any extra money for nearly 24/7 support I do, but I only had to once in the last 4 months.
The servers I'm responsible, are linux only, including ha-linux,HW Raid-5, strong USV, redundant air-condition
and other nifity features you wouldn't expect....:-)
I thought this would be slashdot, so I don't understand:
Are your really mission-critical servers not able to perform stable, secure and reliable operation for one weekend unmantained?
Michael
(For the good arguments I could get from your postings, will be of great help, next time I talk to my BOSS)..:-)
We got 150 pounds ($220) extra for each week we were on call. We got an additional 50 pounds ($75) plus expenses each time we had to go into the office outside normal hours.
After I kicked up a fuss, having spent 3 hours dialed to the customer from home and not being paid, that was changed to 50 pounds if we couldn't talk the customer through it (ie, we had to intervene).
I should say that this was for about 4th line support, so there weren't many calls, but when they came, they were stinkers...
Don't often get it but the Public Service in Canada has a standard .5 hours for every 4 hours on call status. If you get a call to come in you can claim another 2 hours.
This is to the best of my memory.
Everything has a cost. Just remember while they are trying to cheat you out of a few hundred bucks, they are probably flying to Spain first class to a conference. No one looks out for their best interests but themselves.
When I was doing systems programming in Sweden, the unions, both employer and employee unions, agreed that a service call between 8pm and 6am, for a day shift person, was equivalent to 3 hours of your personal time. It was rewarded by 3 hrs pay or 3 hrs of comp time. Maybe there is a need for white collar unions here too.
I swap on-call with one other Sys Admin.
Pay for weekly on-call amounts to 2% of our base pay, whether we take a call or not. During on-call periods, we are expected to be in pager range, able to dial in, and willing to come in if necessary. Any calls taken are subject to overtime (1.5x hourly) with a one hour minimum, including travel time.
Needless to say, we don't complain...this amounts to over $600/month gross, even if we don't take a call.
I once interviewed at Lotus and I was told that the on-call week would add ~$120 to my paycheck for the week and that would only cover the first two hours of the first problem. After that, you'd get paid by the hour for off-hours support. I think this was both for full-timers and consultants.
This is the most fair system that I've ever heard of.
No, I didn't get the job...
I know that Sun Microsystems pays their HARDWARE support people at the rate of 1/4 time for being on-call after hours. The guys typically have 123 on-call hours per week (15 hrs/ weekday + 48 hours over the weekend). Thus for a week of pager standby time they get an additional 30.75 hours pay. That's if they do not actually have to go on-site for a call - if they have to go out, they get the typical 1.5X bump (2X on sundays and holidays).
In my opinion, for the alleged prestige of being 'on salary' workers give away far too much of their lives. These hardware support guys are non-exempt hourly employees.
They should be paid extra for simply being on call, whether they are called or not. This adds the further incentive to make the system as bullet-proof as possible since they still get the extra money. (kharma whoring on) Obviously, a non-Microsoft mail server would be a requirement (kharma whoring off).
Personally, I wouldn't take a job that required me to answer a page at odd hours without a guarantee of extra pay.
-- Will program for bandwidth
As a consultant for a small firm (200 active clients) I had a {pager,cell phone} on 24/7. It was rarely used, but if I had to visit a client (or remain on site) after 5:30, I received 1.5*(hourly rate of salary) PLUS $50 for the first hour and $35 for every hour after. Phone support just got the $50/$35, although I was never on the phone for more than 15 minutes - anything over 15 minutes required a visit. ;-)
I didn't mind the extra work because I was well copensated for my time. IIRC, the client had to pay the $50/$35 (in addintion to our normal rate) while my employer picked up the 1.5 factor.
I was fortunate enough to have an employer who Got It. If yours don't, then you may only be able to get to them with hard numbers on # of incidents expected, time spent / incident and the current amount of time being put in (eg how many hours over 40 for each tech). Then don't forget to mention both time/$$ in finding and training new employees to replace the ones you break!
The labor movement is powerless against those take the start-up gamble and don't mind working 80hrs a week and think anyone they hire should feel the exact same way because of stock options that are probably worthless.
The best part is this doesnt undermine our rights as workers, these people choose to enter shitty situations and prospective employees can shop around.
To get back on-topic this is a non-profit which when used properly an get volunteers to do all sorts of things, maybe even support. Or if money is especially tight you have to ask yourself which jobs are critical and which aren't and replace non-criticals with volunteers to pay for a decent support team. Either that or suffer.
My response is equally simple: Just because MD's are expected to jepoardize their sanity with such punishing schedules, and also their patients' health by trying to perform tasks requiring the finest of judgement when their facilities are working at far below par, does not make it a model for the rest of the world. Quite the opposite. The 24-hour shifts and other ridiculous stretches expected of doctors should have been banned at the same time that minimum rest breaks were specified for truck drivers (hint, that was sixty-plus years ago).
--
Build a man a fire, and he's warm for a day.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Everyone where I work now is salary. Management is VERY reasonable about comp time, etc. on the occasions where paging is necessary.
At my last (support) job it worked like this. You get paged, you get two hours for starters. This would typically be at 1.5 time because you would already be working a 40 hour week, but this was not automatic. If it took more than two hours, you get payed for the time it took, rounded to the next 15 min. So you get paged for 1 hour, 30 min and 3:20min you get 2+2+3.5=7.5 hours. If it became too much (say 4 hours in a night) this, or some part, could normally be taken as comp time.
This seemes fair, because it really is a chunk of time (say, 2 hours) out of your night or weekend, if you have to drop everything for a five minute call.
-Peter
I have supported numerous systems and clients over the past 15 years. Of those only one has offered additional compensation for the support.
;-)
The one that did compensate, did so at a rate of 16% of salary for the week. The others considered it part of your job description and thus it was suppose to be included in your salary.
If you are going to be looking for a job, including development and lead positions, it is an important question to ask. If on-call is expected, you may want to know what that means. Some companies do not support external connections, this mean every page is a trip to the office. Others believe on-call people should work the shift. While it can be a benefit (no calls, you can get plenty of work done), it can be a lifestyle issue.
As a leader I pay people with true production support experience better than others to start.
Call it "trial by fire" because it does differentiate those who think they can from those who really can.
Core dump complete
Hi --
I work at a major colocation ISP. We used to be paid salary plus a bonus for billable hours. Employees used to grumble a bit about 3am calls, but it would add to our bonuses - so we dealt with it.
Recently "Management" took away the bonus, and gave us all a raise to reflect the lost income.
In theory most of us make the same amount of money as before. Morale however has suffered tremendously. 90% of the office leaves at 6pm sharp. Before there would be people here at all hours. The motivation to get out of bed or answer a weekend page is lessened with no "extra" compensation.
Lately we've started losing people, because of the lost bonus and several other factors. Now there are fewer people to be on call, so we get the pager more. It works out to be about every 4 weeks now.
I would expect that pretty soon after the situation becomes unworkable whoever is left here will probably be receiving a bonus again.
The moral? If you expect your employees to give up personal time (which is critical to them) to support your infrastructure (which is critical to you) pay them well for it, or prepare to replace them . . .
The Bank I used to work for had a two tiered approach. The mainframers had to support their stuff 24/7 with no compensation, theory being that if they put the stuff into production it better not need support. The desktop guys (read: Windows support) carried the beeper 1 week in five and got $40 a week + $15 a phone call + $25/hr for onsite plus mileage + (and this is why it worked) 1:1 comp time.
The mainframers didn't like it, but then their stuff VERY rarely needed support.
- First, the support engineer (me) was paid an extra $120 per month for being permanently on call, volume of calls was about 3 - 4 per week. This works out at approx $10 per call
- Then calls got more numerous, support staff got increased, so we shifted. We counted our daily calls, average call times, and came up with:
This didn't warrant an extra person, but it did warrant an extra person day per week. We decided that if it grew to any more we would extend the working day by an hour each way, to reduce the out of hours calls.45 mins per call, 8 - 12 calls per day shift per agent (it's a complex software product) 7 Out of hours calls per week
As you have a 24 hour operation, there may be some munging of numbers, but if you expect 20 - 30 calls per week = 4 calls per day, you might ask for another body to handle the graveyard shift, even if he is sitting on his butt for 3/4 the time. You may even get a CS undergrad to work nights for relatively cheaply
ps To all CS undergrads: don't take this personally! I would have jumped at the chance for a nighttime helpdesk job in my early days...
--
We may be human, but we're still animals.
Depending on where you work, this could actually be illegal. Generally, it is illegal to have an employee work more than 40hrs/week without overtime compensation (set at 1.5x hrly), unless they are managers (defined as managing one or more people).
Of course, IANAL, and I'm a bit vague on all the rules behind this, but I'm pretty sure that they would have to pay you resonable compensation for the work you've done....
From Department of Labor -- Overtime Pay Requirements Of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA):
"... employees covered by the Act must receive overtime pay for hours worked in excess of 40 in a workweek at a rate not less than time and one-half their regular rates of pay. ... Earnings may be determined on a piece-rate, salary, commission, or some other basis, but in all such cases the overtime pay due must be computed on the basis of the average hourly rate derived from such earnings. ... Overtime Pay May Not Be Waived: The overtime requirement may not be waived by agreement between the employer and employees."
HTH,
Chris.
-- I don't have a cool sig.
Actually, no.
The only execptions are based on position, not how you are paid. The bit I quoted even states salary explicitly.
The only real exceptions that might be relevant here are:
* if you are a manager or executive
* if you are a computer _programer_ making the equivelant of $27.30/hr or better.
Otherwise, the law applies just the same, salary or no salary.
Check out the link, I think that it should explain a whole lot, including common problems (e.g. lump sums for variable overtime).
Chris.
-- I don't have a cool sig.
Fuck that Shit! Thank god for caller ID. I would not take a call from work, for the week it would take me to get another job.
The current Slashdot moderation system is made by gay communists!
In any organization where 24x7 support is needed the only real way to go is work in shifts. My company is a sort of service provider that offers day-round connectivity. Needless to say 24x7 is a must.
It is really simple. NOC (network operations center) personnel (or simply operators/sysadmins) are specifically hired with the work time being as following : 3 days on, 3 days off , 3 nights on , 3 nights off. This way if you need 1 person there at all times u gotta hire 4 obviously, but if you NEED 24x7 its the way to go.
All the "pager" stuff is a silly way to torture a person and is completely antiproductive. I never took a pager from a job (had to refuse a couple of times) and i feel strongly that no "on-call" work should ever be done for any reason.
--Ugen
We get comp time for carrying the beeper. 2 hours for the week you carry it, regardless of calls, and then 1 for 1 comp. So if I spend 8 hours on a Saturday working on a problem, I take a weekday off in return.
I always equivocate. Well, almost always.
I work for a Medical equipment vendor (Acuson, now a Siemens subs.) in the external helpdesk. I hate to say it, but we're fighting with the same thing right now. Tenatively what were doing is that there is no additional pay to take on call (we rotate a week at a time), but we'll probably get PTO (paid time off) for any time we have to put in. What we're also pushing for is a four our minimum PTO award if any calls are fielded over the weekend. Hope that helps. -PACSMonkey
The evil monkey commands you to dance.
Work/Life balance has become a recruitment buzzword, but it's very important to those of us with school-aged children. When I was young and single and establishing myself (read: not making nearly what I am now) the money was very important and I was responsible only to myself. Now my paycheck is a little fatter, but my responsibilities extend to several other people. When one of my kids has a soccer game, or karate tournament, or one of their teachers wants to meet with me, I need to put work on hold and be there.
Getting compensating time off allows me to "make up" time with my kids that I may have lost because of work.
I work for a medium-sized regional ISP. We have three call rotations (plus one for senior management): systems, networking and customer service (we don't operate a 24x7 call center). The call rotates through departments of 4-5 people, so everyone is on-call every 4-5 weeks.
We compensate people by paying them an extra day (8 hours) for each week on call at their current rate (everyone is salaried, so there's no easy way to pay them a multiple of current hourly rate.
There's not really differential compensation for what people do when they're on call but if it's really busy most managers give people comp time.
Does this seem fair?
One other thing i thought of that hasn't really been discussed (probably because a disgusting majority of slashdotters are male and are not very gender-aware): are on-call policies gender biased?
women are more likely to have family responsibilities (whether children or elderly, we rely, as a society, on women to take care of everyone). as a result, it may be more difficult for them to take care of on-call duties than it is for men.
does anyone work anywhere where on-call policies are sensitive to these sorts of considerations (not gender, specifically, obviously, but different amounts of time that different people spend on caring for family members)?
At my old job, we had a pager, cellular phone and laptop that changed hands weekly.
If you were on call that week, you got 8 hours of overtime pay, regardless of if you got 0 or 100 pages. Also, for any time you had to come in, you got a minimum of 4 hours pay, and anything over that was time and a half.
This is great for multiple reasons. First, you may not like getting paged, but getting a minimum of 4 hours pay was really nice. Just have to reboot an NT server? No problem! Cha-ching!
Second, the other departments knew of this policy, and we were only paged if it was *critical* since it really ate into IT's budget if the on-call person was paged. Basically, the person who was paging the on-call person had to have a good buisiness reason for the oncall person to come in, or even do anything.
The last, and most important, was the on-call person's ability to say "no". If this was one baffoon who couldn't get his e-mail working on a Sunday, we told him to call the Help Desk Monday. If a production server crashes, then the IT person comes in for sure.
Companies need to let IT be "in charge" like this and have the ability to help or deny help to users depending on the situation. This can lead to arguments of what "critical" is, but management needs to trust IT make these judgement calls, discuss the impact of those decisions later and learn from the decisions made and results viewed.
Let's say I get paged twice, and the first call takes 45 minutes and the second takes two hours. Three hours plus two pages plus one hour (rounded up) plus two hours. I get credit for eight billable hours.
(And yeah, that's considerably more than $120.)
"Ain't no right way to do a wrong thing."
First, there are a lot of holes here to fill in. Does 24X7 mean just critical sytem outage, or does it include any questions the Gaylord Fochers of the world may have for you? Is there any front line technical support 24X7? Is this a crapy exchange based mail system, or something stable in UNIX such as Openmail?
Generally, I've found non-profs are the worst to work for IT wise. It's almost as bad as a Co-op. Limited funding is always an issue. However, this being said I can add the following:
* There are plenty of places that offer outsource support by per minute prices. On the low side you can expect $1.50/Minute. If you have a lot of simple questions you get then this can work well.
A more cost effective measure is to hire a sudo technical person for second shift. Enough to take the heat off, and to be able to do simple tests to determine if the system is really down, or if it's a client issue.
* Being on call is one of the bains of the exempt employee status. It's not uncommon to only be offered comp time. On the other hand, it's not uncommon for an email admin in a 24X7 enviroment to get in the high 50K range as starting pay.
The problem with the wage comparison charts is that they rarely look at the pay ranges for people who work the long 24X7 hours.
Work based compensation is okay, but it doesn't factor in the stuff you can't do because you were tied to the pager.
* You should have the higher ups compare how much you're getting VS how much it would cost to outsource. Compare that to how much value the service you're offering is.
* Finally, if all else fails. It's a good IT market right now. Get a consulting job. Consultants are usually exempt for pager duty, and often you can tell your pimp upfront that you expect time and a half for all after hours works.
I'm the Postmaster for a large State agency. We also have a 24/7 commitment for our e-mail system (Netscape on NT)... I think our on-call compensation is decent, probably the best of anywhere I've been. I carry the pager every third week. I get 8 hours of "comp time", that I can use aas I see fit, regardless of whether I get a call or not. If I have to drive to the office I am compensated for my round trip travel time as well as my on-site time. Not too shabby...Gives me an extra 2 weeks of vacation (more or less) per year... MadMorf
Goofy, Geeky Gifts and More!
Unless you are a saleried employee, then you obviously are screwed.
The FLSA guidelines are very stringent about this, to the point that if a company has had a grievence filed concerning these matters you will generaly find that they will soon mandate tighter control of hours if they deem overtime pay to be a burden to them.
In many states people goverened by FLSA in our field are covered under the "CWA" or "Communications Workers of America" Union. While there may be some benefits to the union, I rather take my negotiations into my own hands.
I have the fortune to be not only a geek, but a nurse. I've worked in hospitals. The only truly "critical" systems are patient records, (which are infrequently computerized) the laboratory software, pharmacy medication software, and drug control systems. Not even the billing/patient registration system is truly critical; this information can be entered the next day. Email? For whom, an administrator working late, maybe? We're not talking about someone's ventilator not working, that'll be an embedded system and not handled by the IT department.
I carry a pager 24/7 and if I am called (even if I'm not on call, I basically put it on my time sheet as "called out" time)... Its not policy but my boss is really cool about it,
UPS Sucks
I work at a DOE lab. It's pretty similar in that we take oncall for 7 days about once every 8 weeks. We get a fixed $40/day whether we are paged or not. This isn't too bad for an average week. On really tough ones, other folks on our team willingly swap a day so the stuckee can get some rest. They are probably worried about paying us on a "per page" basis. We'd probably start getting a lot more "pages".
I have had employers who put me on call and given me a pager and it was invariably a nightmare, worse than you would imagine, worse than you'd believe. I did a writeup about it once and everyone thought it was made up as a joke.
There are two reasonable ways a company can deal with 24/7 service needs:
- Raise the salaries of every person on call (by at least 10k-20k), plus pay them generously for each and every time they're paged - even if it's frivilous. I'm talking the moment that pager goes off the person gets a few hundred bucks, plus at least $100 an hour for any time past the first hour. Since you're seriously disrupting the person's life, you should damn well be compensating them handsomely for it.
- Hire staff to staff the help desk 24/7 and nobody is ever on call and nobody carries a pager or cell phone for the company.
That's it. Nothing else will prevent serious abuse of the people.Now, as for how you should react if the company demands to put you on call anyway:
I work at a glass fabrication plant which is a 5x24 operation. A handfull of the managers there have my phone number if I happen to not be there when a major problem occurs. Where major problem==They can't produce glass. When I get a call, if it's not major, I let them know, and hang up. If it is, I'll dial in and try to fix it, and in rare cases I'll go in. Now, under MA state law, you must be paid for 3 hours of work if you get called in. So if I get called, and resolve the problem in 10 minutes, 3 hours goes down. If I have to drive in, I include my commute time, plus a bit of "crankiness" time. They are too afraid of loosing me to question 5 hours here, and 3 hours there.
As a consultant, I get paid based on my hourly rate, with a minimum 15 minutes if the pager goes off, minimum 1 hour if I have to go in to the office, with the clock running door-to-door. If the company takes your time, they should compensate you - period. Whether that's in the form of compensatory time off, or payroll, you shouldn't stand for anyone taking your time this way, without fair compensation.
--
If R is the set of all sets which don't contain themselves, does R contain itself?
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
We had this problem a while ago at my place of work, people thinking that we lived in a cupboard and could be pulled out at their beck and call. The solution to this we found was to start laying down some very strict ground rules, after having discussed these matters with the CEO and GM. Step 1, was identify the different sections of the network, as to their importance to the business. Step 2, was decide on what Service Level Agreements we'd provide on what equipment. You have to be fair, you're there to provide a service. For example, we promise 5 minute reponse times on all equipment directly related to providing part of our web service, but only a business hours response to LAN PC problems. Step 3, write a document on this. I hate writing documentation for the mases, but it's the best thing I've ever done. Get the high ups to sign off on it. Make sure EVERYBODY gets a copy. That way if you're ever questioned, you can point to it, and say "Your boss agrees - talk to him". It's amazing how much something like that cuts down the nuisance calls. Of course there is still the ability for a LAN user to request help urgently outside hours, but to do so, they have to go through the General Manager.
And I didn't get paid for pages either, would get 3 every time 2 nights a week, latest often at 5 AM.
chris@xanadu:~$ whatis /.
/.: nothing appropriate.
The poor sods here who work production support are simply _expected_ to do it, as part of their normal job - even though it's off hours. That's one of the reasons I transferred to a department where I don't have to carry the damn beeper and answer phone calls at 1 AM an more. The baffling part is why people put up with it. It has been proposed multiple times to management, and they keep coming up with lame excuses why not.
"Bite me, it's fun!" - Crowe T. Robot
The attrition rate for senior staff is very high there, but not necessarily directly related to on-call. (More to do with lack of leadership and some serious cases on craniumrecontonites.) Consequently the availablility of experienced staff for the on-call rotations is low, with some senior people picking up a disproportionate share of the load. This created more stress, which creates a vicious cycle of dicontentment.
On top of all this is a help desk that is only staffed 9-5 (cost reduction) with those duties shifting to development staff off-hours. And on top of THAT add the fact the management consideres themselves exempt from on-call duty despite reserving the right for all decision making to themselves.
It's a wonder there isn't a stampede for the doors...
Chris
}#q NO CARRIER
Except, of course, that this does not apply to IT professionals because the Alberta government is susceptable to bribes.
Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
I believe that if you are on-call, you *are* working -- you are not free to do as you please when you are on the electronic leash. While on call, you deserve to be paid *the* *same* *amount* you would be paid if you were sitting at your desk on-site waiting for service calls to come in.
I've learned from experience to ask during the job interview if any on-call time is required. Personally, I refuse to take jobs that want me to wear an electronic leash; but if I were to take one, I'd insist on being compensated for my time. My free time is MINE, damnit. I take a job on the understanding that they are paying me X amount of dollars for Y amount of work. You want more work, it's going to cost you -- either by me more or by paying a headhunter to find someone to replace me.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
Check out your state's labor laws. This may be illegal. In many/most states, if your employer is restricting your activities IN ANY WAY due to being on-call, then you are ON THE CLOCK -- and this usually applies to "exempt" (salaried) employees as well.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
2. Anyone on-call will be paid an hourly rate equivalent to their salary rate for the hours that they're on-call. In other words, someone whose yearly salary works out to $45/hour and who is on-call from 6 PM to 6 AM will be paid 12*$45 = $540 for this period.
3. If the on-call person is required to deal with an emergency, then the rate for the hours involved is 2X their salary. Continuing the example, if that oncall person has to spend 2 hours solving a problem that night, then their compensation is 10*$45+2*$90 = $630.
Expensive? Yes. That's the point: organizations which request on-call support should be prepared to pay for it, and if they're not -- which, given this sort of expense, most won't be -- then they should carefully consider their requirements and their resources and decide how best to utilize them in order to make on-call support unnecessary. (It's simply amazing to me how many organizations I've seen which have chosen to band-aid their problems through ill-considered on-call support rather than actually allowing their staff to configure/upgrade/manage their systems and networks in such a way that they don't need on-call support. It's one of the classic cases of PHB thinking.)
At my current job, I get $500 a month. I often work at home as well. I usually work all day too. My boss would like me to work with another guy who works days, so therefor I would have to work at night too. Basically, it adds up to around 13 hours a day that I should be (according to managment) working. All this because we where promised lots of money soon...
I figure we (there are two of us) around $1.92 an hour. And they wonder why I'm looking for another job...
Maybe we DID take the blue pill. You wouldn't remember anyway.
I do network/server support for one of the largest companies in the world. Me and my co admin have about 350 servers, 2000 Ethernet, and 2000 token ring users that we support in our office. The way on call is handled is we have an on call pager. We alternate holding this pager week to week. We get one billable hour for every 3 hours we are on call. i.e. I work 10-7 and bill 2 more hours for the on call coverage from 7pm to 10am. If I receive a call and can handle it over the phone we bill at least 2 hours for that and more if it took more time. If I have to come in then we bill 4 hours for that and more if it takes more time. If I have to come in 4 times in one night then that's a min. of 16 billable hours for the work and 2 for just being on call. This has worked very well because all their mission critical applications and servers are well maintained and their techs are taken care of. If by chance you did have to work all night, you sure make up for it next pay check.
I've never worked anywhere where someone was paid extra to carry a support pager. It was part of their (and my) job description, even if it got added to it against our will.
That said, I've seen plenty of ways people do a good job of getting out of "pager duty."
The best is if you can get a rotating pager. Chances are good that people will forget to turn over the pager on time. Then you can "forget" the pager and leave it at work for at least a day. You can also swap in a dead battery and blame the previous person.
But my all-time favorite is when they finally got ahold of my tech lead one weekend with some pseudo-urgent problem. He said "well, I'm too drunk to come in, so deal with it yourself."
We prefer to build a contract that allows for per incident, rather than cost-average on a weekly basis. Per incident gets closer to your costs and closer to the customers usage. If you charge per week instead of per incident, then inevitably either you are charging them too much (for when there are few calls in the week) or you are losing too much (when there are too many calls per week). IMHO.
Daniel
This not only solves your problem of tech staff being overwhelmed by on-call duties, but the manager of the help desk is then responsible for budget and staff increases as the responsibilities increase.
You're just experiencing growning pains. Remember, support needs always grow. I have never heard of a support organization shrink because the company involved dropped some troublesome technology. Sell this idea by telling management you're positioning yourself for the future.
If they balk at the expense, you can lease 24/7 support desk service from any number of vendors. And before you ask, yes, prompt service will suck if you don't spend the cash. Hey, it's that or lose the techies they've already got...
John
Disclaimer: Before you believe anything I write, remember that in the back of my mind my retirement depends on my company's stock doing well over the next 20-30 years.
John
I didn't catch if you folks are getting paid hourly or if you're salaried employees. I worked at an ISP where the emergency pager was rotated around the staff (someone new got it every two weeks), and if the pager went off after hours the pager person was compensated for their time. Of course, we were all hourly employees so it was a bit easier.
At my last job (not the aforementioned ISP), our sysadmins had a rotating on-call schedule, so no one person was stuck answering all the "Server/Router Down" phone calls all the time. Usually, if someone was really stuck working late after hours, she would simply come in a few hours late the next day. It was a pretty good system: abusable, but with a small enough group and a decent manager, definitely workable.
In any case, your best bet is to sit down and talk with your manager and voice your concerns. Make your points calmly, yet firm. Let her know that you feel the volume of work is going to increase dramatically and that there should be a similar increase in compensation. Good luck.
--Mando
Well they should pay you more or you should quit.
But assuming they won't and you can't, try to put incentives in place to keep RTFM calls down.
If you get a question that you find has already been answered in the company intranet, than you should get paid $30 and that $30 comes from the other person's department.
Since it is a hospital ask for the same rate as the M.D.'s get paid for on call. If it is mission critical then it must be life or death. Be like the Docs.
From 1991 through 1996 I worked for a large service industry firm (being vague on purpose). In early 1996 we took on data center proccessing that formerly had been done in Europe for our subsidiaries there.
We had 6 people dedicated to handling technical calls for over 15,000 users worldwide. And we had other duties besides just dealing with phone calls all day, which numbered maybe 200 during normal business hours of 9-5.
At that time management issued pagers to all 6 members of the technical services department. They expected ALL of us to carry them and respond within 30 minutes whenever we were paged, 24 hours a day 7 days a week. They would give us a break only during scheduled vacations. And they offered no extra compensation for doing this.
I had a few discussions with my manager, his manager and the area VP about this. I was basically told "If you don't like it, maybe it's time you found a new job". I tendered my resignation right there on the spot. I was gone 2 weeks later, and had to fight them to get my unused vacation pay. About 3 months later I saw my previous position being advertised in local newspapers, both directly and through headhunters. Remember, this wasn't exactly a support-desk position. I had system programming responsibility for a mainframe machine and network responsibility for an in-house LAN. 8 months later they were still looking for someone to fill the position I had held.
There's no happy ending here, (yes, I did get another job) but I just thought I'd share my personal experience in how nasty and unprofessional some companies can be when it comes to fair compensation policies.
In my company we give 24x7 email support and this is forwarded via SMS to a tech persons mobile phone who is then supposed to decide if it needs dealing with etc. etc. etc.
There is no extra pay for this.
However, there is no company phone or pager, I don't have a mobile so I'm not eligible to go on call.
Funny thing is my workmates are perplexed about why I don't have a mobile.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. (Einstein)
I am a consultant as well...
On call is part of the job, whether or not it's a consulting job, or a regular employee. As a consultant I dont get paid for being on call, but I do get paid a minimum of 2 hours if I do get called - it's the way my firm negotiated the contract.
I've grown sick of the world and its people's mindless games
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.-Franklin
Simple answer...the company pays what they want, if it is not enough, quit.
www.bleepyou.com
If I were you, I'd leave. Now.
:)).
:)
I'm not sure what the exchange rate is, but I'm in the UK and here is what
I get paid for callout: 200ukp for carrying the mobile around for a week.
If I get called, I get paid for the time I spend solving the problem
(however I solve it - over the 'phone or onsite) at 1.75 times my normal
hourly rate, with a minimum of one hour per call, even if sort it out in 5
minutes. Also, for every hour after midnight that I spend on a call, I get
an hour off in leiu the next day - so if I get a call at 1am, have to go
onsite, and don't get back till 4am, I can come in 3 hours late the next
(same, really) day. (Hey, I need my beauty sleep
I'm lucky in that the systems I support are pretty stable, and we get an
average of 1 call every 3 or 4 months. Now, I have a pretty good deal here,
I know that. The reason for that is that when I have worked for companies
in the past that tried to screw me by trying to get me to give up my social
life for peanuts, I left. There are companies out there that value their
staff. I suggest you find one. Your life will be much better for it.
As it happens, I'm on call tonight
--
obscurity.
"Only the great masters of style ever succeed in being obscure." - Oscar Wilde.
When I worked at a defense contractor their policy was 1 hour per day for being on call, minimum of 1 hour if you got called and had to do something, and 4 hours if you actually had to drive to the office to fix it. Obviously if you got called multiple times for the same problem (i.e. you didn't fix it right) it all counted as one "call". Since most people were on a salary, it ended up being comp-time instead of pay. I was lucky, I was classified as a "tech" so I got time-and-a-half for all the hours.
I work for a ISP doing Unix Administration. I am only available part-time(I goto college and I am 17) and there is another tech working during the daytime. I work only a few days per week.
I carry a pager and if a server goes down, I get pages, and I am chosen to fix the problem because alot fo the time, the other Admin need assistance.
Where the FUCK is my boss.
Brb.
This may necessarily be the best idea, but in working towards a viable approach to on-call benefits this is what we came up with at the company I work at: 168 hours in a week - 40 hours regular salary pay = 128 hours. Pay minumum wage (6.85 on Ontario) for 128 hours, muliply by 52 weeks gives you a yearly salary. This is then subsequently split between persons sharing on-call duties. So: 128*6.85*52=45593.60 Since there's 4 persons rotating on-call duties, they each get 45593.60/4=11396.40 included in their yearly salary and paid each pay period accordingly. As technicians are added and removed to the rotation, payment is recalculated accordingly and adjusted at the beginning of each pay period. It works out quite well - you're looking at approximately 475-ish extra per pay period (before taxes, paid twice monthy) - and volume ranges from once or twice a week for calls, to several times per night. No complaints so far :)
I've worked on call at two separate companies. At the first I worked one week in three and wore a pager between 6pm and 8am. There was a standard amount of £75 (about $100) paid for the week, plus each call was charged at time and one third. I never got called on it. Also if two calls were received within a 45 minute period, you only charged one hour. If the calls were 46 mintues apart, you could charge another hour. At my current compay I work about one week in six. For this we are paid £2,000 per year plus time and one third for all calls. This will soon be changed to pay per week you are asked to be on call, and the monies are being increased accordingly. From what you've said your management seem to be treating you fairly shabbily in IT payment terms. Hope this info helps. Steve
That's what they do where I work. We're on salary with no such thing as paid overtime. We work around the situation by prioritizing calls. There are some things that will simply wait until the next business day and e-mail is usually one of those. If we can fix it over the phone or via dial in, great. If not, we'll get it first thing tommorow.
Also, the job market being what it is right now, you can always either demand better rates/pay for the oncall period with the threat of finding another job. Caveat, it's best to have another job waiting before you do this.
I work for one of the USA's largest (if not THE largest) philanthropies and am part of a team responsible for maintaining servers and user workstations in each of the four time zones in the continental US. Until recently, all support calls were made to our headquarters in Maryland, but the help desk there only worked fstandard business hours.
Two months ago, to better service our user base, we outsourced our help desk support to a 24/7 company called Seneca that specializes in end-user support. They maintain a knowledgebase specific to our company, so the more calls they handle, the better they get at dealing with our specific users. If they can't fix a problem, they escalate it to an internal tech like me.
What's great about this company is that all the support calls are entered into a web-accessible database. Non-mission-critical calls are usually filtered out for us, and a list of currently unresolved calls is always available for us to view on the web.
Outsourceing saves all of us a headache, knowing support is always there and nobody has to have their private lives disturbed unless it's an absolute emergency.
We have much the same schedule, but we get reimbursed at 2.50 / hr to "carry the pager" and answer incoming calls. That's 128 "after hours" hours over 7 days. That's an extra $320. Note that the after hours calls must be of "an emergency nature" or we aren't required to respond until the next business day. If a call requires that we visit the office we get our hourly rate for a minimum of 4 hours (or actual if it takes longer). - Calls are logged and reviewed by management.
"Straddling the sword of technology..."
I'd agree with most of the other posts regarding the value of on call work. If your not part of a labour union, it is really tough to get properly compensated for on call work.
After having my boss laugh at the group of us who elegantly presenting solid facts and figures supporting higher pay for on call work, we sold him on the idea of a better information management system.
We now have several things that drastically reduce the ammount of after hours tech support. Things like proper training, access to online courses, a knowledge base system, and a big message on both our pager number and our support site that asks people to use the service only in an emergency and only when they have explored every other support option availiable.
This has worked quite well for us. Allthough I'm still in favor of higher on call support rates, 24/7 tech support allows the company to increase sales which is good.
rejected (19) accepted (0)
Is there a psychological term related to getting your stories rejected on slashdot?
At my last job, the support staff were expected to perform well when on-call. That meant that they were required to respond within 15 minutes, which basically tied them to their homes.
However, the compensation was good. They received a nominal hourly rate just for carrying the pager, and if paged, they received overtime pay for it. There was also a "minimum charge time" of an hour - so if they got a five-minute call, they were still payed an hour's worth for the trouble of getting up at 3 AM.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
when i worked at an ISP, we had the duty pager as well. We all got paid an hourly rate based on our salary*1.5. I feel this was a great way of doing it, and made people not feel so angry about being on call.
I work for a large communications company in Canada, and when we take the "On Call Cell phone" we get paid 2 hours of regular time each day we take the phone even if we never get called (up to a maximum of 8 hours per week), during that time if we get called its all overtime pay minimum 1 hour (those 1 minute conversations are great). If we work more then 4 hours, the next 4 hours are double time.
There are people at my company that are on call 24/7, but they get huge pay increases for doing so.
ideal; model tiny; codeseg; org 100h; start: cli; hlt; ret; ENDS; END start
END SECTION.
--ricardo
sgis ddo ekil t'nod i
This same hospital pays its doctors, nurses, etc, to be on call. If they get paged, called in, they paid there work time in addition to the amount they're getting paid to be on call. Hospitals put staff on-call because patient care is considered mission-critical. If they want to handle support in in the same matter, they should be prepared to pay it out in the same manner.
Shameless plug for my photos on Flickr
If you're willing to live in Sillycon Valley, we could really use some sysadmins (and have you worked/suffered with Oracle before?)...
Being on-call has been part of the last few jobs I've had. I'm excempt and have never gotten pager-pay.
As a system admin, you have a vested interest in making things run well. If you're good, you shouldn't get too many pages. Non emergency stuff should be handled by a night person or have it wait until morning.
If you're pager goes off in the middle of the night, you shouldn't be expected to show up in the morning. Not on time anyway.
For my employers it's also been a two way street. If things are running well and I want to take my daughter to the park, I go. 24/7 support doesn't necessarily mean the end of family life, it can improve it.
--- If it's worth doing, it's worth doing in Perl!
The company I work for pays minimum wage for oncall support. Oncall is Monday - Saturday 6pm - 9pm only though. I think it is an excellent rate being that you are working from home and get dedicated DSL access free. They also pay half of the customer charge for html/asp work (done on the clock too). For example, if you were to charge a customer $100 for design, you get $50.
$50/hr, no upper limit
however....they much prefer instead that I bill them as straight time and leave a bit earlier one or two days. Unofficial comp time.
..if this were a sig, it might be funny
I once worked in a combined AS/400 WinNT shop and was on call for 2 weeks every 2 months. We were paid and extra $300 or so for the trouble. There was a period where management for the IT dept. thought the on call staff were getting too many pages/calls at home (so did we!) so they implemented a plan where the department from which the call was made was charged $60 per incident - this cut out many of the frivilous calls. Managers don't like to pay for stuff they don't deem necessary and certain things don't seem as important when they impact your bottom line.
At a former employer, I had similar after-hours responsibilities. I was on a pager rotation (1 week every 7). I was paid as follows:
$60 for each complete week on-call
Regular overtime for each phone call fielded, minimum one hour.
Regular overtime for on-site visits, minimum four hours.
Regular overtime means 1.5 regular rate after hours, double between 11pm-7am, double on Sundays and holidays.
Not a bad deal, really.
Fortunately, we rarely get called. We can go 2-3 weeks without a single call. Therefore, since our mainframe COBOL/CICS apps actually work, upper management is now busy trying to replace them with client-server stuff running on NT servers. And, when they do, we'll still have to take on-call for them, and still get paid US$0.00 for the privilege.
"Settle down, Beavis. We've got an experiment to do."
I get one hours pay if paged, minimum 2 hours if I have to go in.
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts."
...was in Australia in 1989, but the people doing on-call support were getting paid $5/hour for the time they were on call.
This was approx 20-40% of their daily pay rate. They thought it was a pretty good deal as they only received about one call a week, mostly during the day on the weekend.
I'd definitely demand an hourly rate instead of (or in addition to) payment per call/site visit. The thing about being on-call is that even when you're not taking calls you have to be ready to take calls. This means you should be compensated for the whole time you are on-call, not just the time you actually spend solving somebody's problem.
It works something like this. Joe B. has the standby pager, and is sitting at home. Suddenly he gets paged, with some secretaries email down. "Email is out all over!!!". Joe comes into work, kicks the exchange servers once or twice, and everything works fine. Actual time elapsed? 25 min. driving time, 15 min work time. Total= 40 minutes.
Joe B. would get paid for two hours worth of work at time and a half, however, because it was after hours, and because of the minimum call in.
This does one of two things. Bean counters hate losing beans to time and a half call ins. And, they hate seeing time cards that don't add up mathematically. This pisses them off, who complain up the chain.
Higher ups in the company suddenly notice that with all these time and a half call ins, you're making more money than them. Since you can now afford that expensive new car that they can't, they get pissed.
Pretty soon, memo's will be dispatched throughout the office dictating that the once deemed priority is no longer such a priority, and that anyone calling in a frivelous call will get strung from their genitals outside the third floor window.
-----------------------
Yet another item that may be of use to you comes from the military. (This is what I use...)
It's called a job priority assignment worksheet, and it's simple as hell to use.
First, type up all the system types you folks work on. (EG Workstation, Life Support, etc) Assign it a priority status starting with 1 being the highest down to 3. (At this point, the military also uses an alphabetical identifier. 1A, 1B, 2A, 2B, etc...)
List all the equipment systems along with what you think is the appropriate priority. Then, assign those priorities "response times."
For instance, you'd have to drop all and run for a priority 1A outage, but anything 2B or lower can wait until the next shift. The extra numbers give a bit of lee-way in which jobs are higher on the scale than others.
If you get 2 calls in one night, and the first one is a 3B, and the second one is a 2B, you fix the 2B first the next day.
Oh, and you need someone high up in the company to hack off on this too, so it's not your ass when you tell a customer "tough".
Hope it helps.
krystal_blade
It will be easy to motivate our fellow man; there is hardly anything people treasure more than not being annihilated.
I am currently employed by a consulting company. We had a pretty good system, although I think I need to have a talk with my boss about some type of flat rate. We typically bill the client 25% above their normal rate, and the tech ends up with normal salary + $10/h. Not too bad, atleast I thought so before everyone else chimed in :)
I am a contract programmer who has had to carry the cell phone before. My client let me bill an additional 4 hours over the 2-week period I carried it. Plus, my company also gave me additional pay while I had it ($8/weekend day and $4/weekday). It isn't much more, but it was nice to get both the overtime and the extra from my company.
IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
GOBACK.
...took 9 months of complaining by the techs (basically, me) to decide they should pay the on call person. They started paying $100/week flat rate (0 to 100 calls). Support was 24/7 and had a 30 min. response time. There was no on-site support involved. Their were about 5 after hours calls per week (outside the regular 8 Am to 6 PM M-F time). Most call times avgd. 20-30 mins., so it was quite rare to get a call short enough to duck outside for 5 mins to answer. It wasn't worth it for the $100. I do like several of the arrangements I have seen in other postings here.... They start to compensate you for your loss of free time, not just the extra work time....
The company I work for we support Industrial customers ie... petro chem plants and such. We have a 24/7 oncall service. Currently the pager, which is active from 5P till 8A, gets passed around the group about once every 5 - 6 weeks. We hold it for 7 days. While we are holding it we do not get a dime. If the pager goes off and we can help the customer over the phone we dont get anything. If we do have to go out to the customer site then it is over time (double time on Sun. and Holidays) with a min of 4 hours. On average the pager goes off one to two times a week. Most of the time when the pager goes off it does result in us having to go to the customer site to resolve the problem they are having.
So bascily during the week that we hold it if the pager goes off and we go out then we get OT or DT. If it does not then we don't get anything.
---
---
Slashdot: News For Zealots. Stuff That's Hypocritical.
At one place, taking the pager got us no extra flat rate, but we were supposed to charge calls at a two-hour mnimum, and since most calls were 1 hr or less, ad we carried a company cell-phone and such accoutrements along with the pager, this usually worked out OK.
At another place, well, it was just part of the deal, no ups, no extras.
I have been a manager, employee, and consultant where 7x24 is the rule (ps: there is also no such thing as holidays either!) Every time I have been asked to wear a pager, I have shown the costs envolved and ask "Do you realy want to pay for that?" and should out ways to get the same results.
SO --
Consultants -
Being "on call" is being on the job. Every hour you are "on call" is an hour worked. That is what customer asked to you do. PERIOD.
Employees -
Hourly or Salary - the States have overtime limits were your employer is required to give people time rest. Being "on call" is being on the job. Every hour you work you are to be paid. Many full-time salaried employees have sued and won money of past MANORY over time pay.
Managers -
IF 7x24 is a requirement, staff 3 shifts 7 days a week. Every thing else is taking advange of your staff. If 5x18 is required, try flex time, alot of employees and consultants would love to come to work around noon, and others around 5am.
Hire the employee, don't abuse them.
My company, for one, does not pay extra for being "on call". That means anyone can choose to call you at any hour of the day or night. It is what is generally expected. I suspect it is a rather common situation these days.
I used to do support for Delta Airlines and we billed them hourly. You started the clock when the pager went off. If it required an on site visit, the clock didn't stop till you arrived home. All calls were billed at a minimum of 1 hour.
I cannot help but to react there. I do really thinks life's not that simple.
Let's forget the debate : 'you are young but wait till you'll get a life...' Though I think it does apply here, there are other arguments.
The situation :
I'm working (in canada) for one of those big telecom companies that were startup a few tenth (maybe more) years ago.
Since our client are cell phone operator, there is no discussion on the need for on-call people. And since our 'application' is made by more that 100 developpers, it's not only one pager/cell that are needed, but dozen of thems.
The policy here is simple : competent people take the pager/phones in turn, and are paid for that. Usually 'competent' means anybody not too new, and without a very good excuse not to be on call.
Being first line get you 50 CA$ a day, secund line (backup) 25CA$ a day.
And since our overtime is paid, if you are called off-hours, then you charge overtime (ie 1.5x).
Of course, when you are on call, you're suppose to be at your desk within 20 minutes if needed, and you're not leaving the town. So much for leisure, and enough of the company policy.
Now to answer mangino : YES I want to be paid for that. Because your software is maybe small enough that you feel confident to support it. But believe me, with more complicated stuff, you get called around 60% of the time for something the tiny part you did design did NOT cause. The problem is anywhere else, but you are going to troubleshoot it.
More generally speaking, we just launched a new product last year, and until some support organisation was put in place, the design group was naturally responsible for support.
Not everybody liked that, to say the least, and even the relatively good compensation policy mentionned earlier did not prevent some 'near-strikes'
Because beeing on call means constant pressure, and handling a fire with a big customer is NEVER an nice experience on the moment. It takes a very special kind of individual (preferably single) to like this kind of work, wich has nothing to do with computer science and desing.
But some like it hot...
hope it helps,
[Pruneau
Ahhh...I fell into that trap myself once. If you doubt for a second that this startup will hesitate in bleeding you dry and burning you out, wake up. This is a scam that preys on idealistic employees.
Get cut-throat. Your employer will when they tank.
sucks in any industry. I work in the paper industry for a major automation supplier. We have a 24/7 call number in case anything happens to our system, critical or not-so-critical. If our customer can't make paper due to our system failing, it potentially can cost $100K/hour in production.
Someone carries the pager for one week and must respond within 30 minutes.
For compensation I earn roughly half a weeks' salary in either cash or comp-time. I decide how I receive the compensation.
The pro's probably equal the con's in that some weeks are quieter than others. Sometimes the pager never goes off and sometimes it goes off at 3am. Like when someone has a new e-machine and needs the manuals and calls a number and goes through three levels of menus and product lines to get to technical support for a computer we don't support. I didn't return the call.
But the cash is worth it to a certain extent in that when I get it I can upgrade parts of my home system.
Ask for the additional compensation.
I was the only responsible admin at my last job, a start-up that was sold out. If our servers were down after hours or other issues I would just come in when I felt like it or not (depending how long the issues took to resolve) the next day.
Granted I was salary but the company understood this.
The One vacation I took while working for them, I got paged ( the other admin was screwing off somewhere) so when I got backed I billed @ $100/hour with no arguments.
// what do you mean that was the only copy...
fragbait
When I was a mere programmer analyst, I was on call 24/7 for five years straight with no extra compensation. (really!)
Quit whining
(BTW I had to walk to the computer room 10 miles through the snow)
Seriously, I am pretty surprised to see any compensation being thrown at people for this. Most I have usually seen is comp-time. Most mainframe shops I have seen, even as a consultant, the oncall goes with the turf, BUT we had control of the apps that we were on call for. Pretty good incentive to clean up code.
I guess I will have to kick more if asked to be oncall.
Myself, I rather enjoy picking up the phone on weeks when I know I am not going out of town and nothing that can't be interrupted is happening. Two hours of comp time for me is about $45, so it seems I am being underpaid. :)
I find this to be reasonably fair, since ringing me up in the middle of the night does indeed deprive me of two hours of sleep, even if it's a 5 minute problem. Of course, I value my time a lot more than money, so I'd rather be paid in time anyway. I pick up the phone for 4 weeks and get to take an extra Friday off during those long stretches of no holidays. I know many people would rather see some cash flow for wearing the company's leash, but in my specific instance, anything I get called on is truly my problem, as the phone is for support on a very specific range of problems.
If I was getting called every time some user couldn't find the Send button, I'd be asking for cold, hard (under-the-table) cash, though. Fixing a bug in one's code is far different from dealing with a semi-computer-literate user who wants to make Toy Story 3 using his e-mail client.
Do not touch -Willie
While working in the IT dept. of a small regional hospital we were on the same call-time arrangement as the nursing staff. You got normal time if you were called in, and a small amount for having to be on-call. The best part was it was a pretty easy sell to the CFO.
I wouldn't consider anything but overtime pay fair. But I'm used to being paid as a consultant. I've seen lots of employees that will do ridiculous amounts of work for free. I don't think this is a clear fair/not fair issue. It's always a poker game and if you go to far in what you try to get away with, you may get burned.
At $INTERNET_STARTUP_COMPANY, the on-call person does not get any extra compensation. We have a cell phone (a Nextel-powered Motorola i1000, actually) that each of us carries for one week. Everyone in my department is salaried-exempt, and it was explained to us by my boss that since we are salaried, we are being paid a set amount of money for our expertise and services, and we need to buckle down and be more team-oriented instead of complaining about wanting more money. Meanwhile, the Marketing department gets free, company-provided breakfast from a different catering company every day. It's hard to be team-oriented when people who do nothing but complain all day get gourmet croissants and exotic fruit (that was Monday), but when that freaking Nextel goes off at 2:30 in the morning because some researchers in Germany can't VPN into the network, I get nothing except tired as hell. Sigh...
Any hours worked in core day (8 hours) paid at straight scale Any hours on call (beyond the 8), you get 1/2 time, since you are not really working If at any time, you are called, and have to do work, you are paid a minimum of 2 hours and straight time from there till you are done.
I don't think anyone should enter this biz without expecting to spend some of their life fixing shit at 2am, but you can't really call yourself a good sysadmin until you have learned to control the number of calls you get.
Whenever I have done callout I used to get considerably less calls than anyone else on rota because they knew that if I get a dud call - the person calling will get an earful of abuse and pay for it. I'm a great believer in Karma - fuck back as much as you've been fucked.
Every company wants 24x7 support on the cheap, it is your duty to the brotherhood (and Sister Mary) to lead them to the light.
Now I'm a manager and my staff get
1) a flat rate for the week
2) a per hour callout rate
3) beauty sleep next day if the call came in after 2300 hrs - hey I don't want an ugly, miserable, useful for nothing techie haunting the cubicals
4) leased line to their home after 6 months of being on call
If you can't get paid in cash the manybe your managers can get creative with comp schemes - free Ultra Sparcs, extra training (I bet you don't get training either do you?) etc
I have worked at several places that require me to do after hours 24x7 support. Most gave some sort of compensation, be it % of salary, hourly rate, currently I work network and unix security and this obvoiusly requires 24x7 support. I split it with another 2 co-workers, and for compensation we usually get comp time. Money is good, but what use is it if you don't have time to spend it? We take a 1:1 for every minute. I have taken comp time and let it build up and used it as a week's vacation, not even touching my vacation time. Comp time is very nice.
nb
Fortunately, I'm not at a job where I'm on call anymore, but I used to work for a hospital as a Network Manager, and we had "On Call Pay" there. I was salary aside from that, and the way it worked was that I got $0.82/hour for every hour that was not a "normal business hour". So, since I was salary, it's assumed that I'm being paid my normal pay for being there 8-5 monday-friday (don't I wish it were that little). So they total up the number of hours NOT included in that time and multiply by .82 = additional on call pay. I was the only Network person, so I always got it, but the PC techs switched off from week to week, and whoever had the pager, got the pay for that week.
Hope this helps!
I agree. What could they possibly be paying their support staff in the first place that would make sixty bucks seem like money? At my job, overtime is time and a half, and they are very conscious of the fact that qualified IT pros can walk off at any time and find a new position elsewhere if they don't like the situation here. Take advantage of that demand and leverage yourselves a better deal. If they think they can just hire someone else to put up with this, then their HR staff's in for some overtime themselves.
* Please do not read my signature.
We ran into the same problem over at my company, then we decided to outsource everything except for internal 9-5 support. Check out http://www.ummail.com . They're a pretty large scale Exchange server outsourcing shop, they take care of all the account creation, backups, restore s, ect.
For backups try connected online backup. No complaints from my users yet!
--toq
$60? Are you serious? No way. That's pretty pathetic. One way to do it is just to offer to pay an on-call person a double hourly rate for all-on call hours he/she works. That way, the management sees it in the bottom line, and you'll definately find people who wouldn't mind being on-call.
How much LESS would you be willing to be paid to do this work Mike? If your company is so "neat" and you like what you do why don't you give back some of your salary to that they can be even more successful?
Clearly this is a silly concept, but your post makes no sense. It's not a ideology, it's a BUSINESS you work for, and they exist to make money and nothing else. You are simply an unavoidable business expense, and if they could
get rid of you they would.
And BTW, if you need to get up three times a night to fix problems then either your systems are poorly designed and maintained or you are terribly understaffed. I hope you have stock options because if not someone is lining their pockets with the sweat of your brow.
When I work, I get paid. You should too.
I've held many jobs, but I will never work for a company where I have to be on call. No incremental salary compensates for the lost family time and lost personal time. I work for a living, yes, but I'm doing precisely that: working for a living, not working as my life. Living comes afterwards, at the end of the day, when I can go home and see the smiling faces of my loved ones and feel content about my small place in the universe.
It's like with leasing a home: I own my house because it's important enough to me that I want full control of it. It's the same with one's occupation: I don't want to lease my life; I want it to be my own life, and I don't want to have to answer to my boss unexpectedly at all hours of the day and night. It pains me to see so many people of my generation taking up the yoke of servile labor our grandparents and great grandparents fought so hard to unload. eighty-hour work weeks? Previous generations fought tooth and nail to get a ten-hour workday, and we undo their efforts in one fell swoop.
-- Anne Marie
I work as a retail manager for a small to mid size company in Oregon. I also do system support when the network lady is on vacation (wiggle this cable, restart, use another terminal). Even with two pagers for both jobs I get paid zilch. I don't know if this is even legal. I'm very interested in hearing more about other companies' payment schemes.
At my company, we are to say the least "grossly" understaffed. Our support ratio is totally ouf whack, and if something breaks, the engineer who will most likely be able to solve the issue, or the closest engineer if it's something that all are able to handle is called. For that service, we get to keep our job. We don't get any comp time, or comp pay. We are paid decent salaries, but just because we had to get out of bed doesn't mean we get a bonus. Just thought you'd like to know how the other half lives.
Why don't you have customers post questions on Slashdot? There are always more than enough people who seem to be experts in every subject who discuss every point to death. Oh, wait, it has to be a meaningless question.
Here, here. I work for a similar healthcare outfit which does not compensate at all for on-call pager duty after hours. The management seems to think we do on-call because we like it. We don't like it. Many engineers in my group have taken their talents elsewhere and cited 7 days of on-call in a highly stressful environment every four to six months without compensation as an important factor in their decision to leave the company. Unfortunately, management seems to be indifferent to the situation in spite of the high cost of replacing these skilled and knowledgeable individuals. The truth is, pointy haired managers simply do not have a grasp of the issues regarding remedial maintenance support. Their expectation is based on uptime percentages devoid of the human cost to acheive those numbers. This is a losing battle on the technical end. The pointy hairs seem to clearly grasp the concept of time in the opposing direction however. When negotiating on-call compensation, suggest time off on a 1:1 ratio for on-call time on and see how fast they recognize the value of worktime.
Jeepmeister
I don't need no estinkin'
Jeepmeister
At my company, I have the Level 3 support pager for our primary business application about 70% of the time. That's 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. And we're a global firm, with about 700 users, so 10 AM emergency in Britain is pretty darn early for me. Anyway, my incentive is this: to *NOT* be paged.
My primary concern, then, is to make sure our system is robust enough that I don't get paged. I (and several others) spend a lot of time during working hours keeping things clear, tracking down bugs, improving the system, testing, testing, testing, and so on. And you know what? This MS-based (can you believe it?) worldwide app works. It rarely has problems in production. If I was getting paid directly (case-by-case, by the hour, whatever) for all the nominal support (time carrying the pager) I did, I wouldn't bust my butt to make sure that I didn't have any real off-hours support (fixing problems at 3 AM) to do.
That's not to say that we don't have occasional problems, but the trend is always toward fewer, not more. And that's what I get paid for.
Granted, not everyone doing support has the luxury of being in a position to improve the system, but that's probably just a failure to make people accountable/responsible. You want e-mail to run? Then make your e-mail administrator pull support for it and give him the power and responsibility to run the server. If it isn't reliable, a few 3 AM calls when it breaks, and he'll make damn sure the thing runs. If someone else has to clean up my mess, I won't ever bother to just be neat.
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If you ever drop your keys into a river of molten lava, forget 'em, because man, they're gone. -- Jack
Where I am, the on-call person gets $1.50/hr to carry the pager, and 1.5 * hourly rate for work done as a result of a call, regardless of whether or not it was done on the phone, dial-up, or on-site. Also, if the person has a late night due to calls, it is expected that they will be late/absent the next day.
I work as a field service tech for a major ISP. There are two techs at our office including myself. We service about 30 pops in two states with each pop being no more than a 3.5 hour drive from our office. We are both on call 24/7. However each week whois on "primary" or "secondary" call. The tech on primary call gets called first. (duh) It is rare that we will ever be called at the same time, but if we have two outages at once, the secondary on call tech assumes the lesser emergency. Being on call is part of our job, and we do not get extra compensation for carrying our pagers, but the company does reward us well with a good salary, comp time, and many other great benefits.
In our company we are RIch with Meow and must all band together in order to succeed. NOCmonkey takes all the credit for fighting his way to the top.
Yeah but they fired all the programming staff. I guess everyone is an asshole, except management. Makes perfect sense. Just like everyone else is wrong except you, eh? I think it's somebody's nap-time.
We had a duty pager that was supposed to rotate among 6 IT people. Unfortunately 4 of them new nothing about NT adn only 2 of us new the Email/Firewall system. I was the only one that new 2 specialized systems. The result was the person with the duty pager tended to re-direct the pages to the appropriate person. We had a 1 hour responce time to the ionitial querry, then another 3 hours (4 total) to problem resolution. We got no compensation for having the pager. Well, not true. The Salaried guys(the 2 of us that new most of it) didn't get any compensation. The hourly guys got paid from when they took the call until it was resolved. Invariably this was overtime and it cause some dissention. On the upside when we returned the page, and we got there voicemail because they weren't at there desk, we considered it there problem. Sometime si'd returnt eh call within 30 seconds(Cell phones a must) and they wouldn't be there. If your working, then you should get paid. If your salaried, then you get comp time. A bad weekend would result in me taking Tuesdays off(Mondays are to hectic to take off). That didn't make up for 911 calls while I'm at the movies with my kids, nor the arguments when I tell them I'll be ther in 2 hours, because I lived an hour away and i wasn't dressed. Sigh....
Little NT, Little Linux, heavy dose of 98SE, Cable Modem, and a firewall and BAM...instant party!