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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."
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?"
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?
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.
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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
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.
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."
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.
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
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.
The word "their" is spelled as I have done, and not as "thier".
-b
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
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?
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!
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'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
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.
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.
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.
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
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
I've done a lot of healthcare consulting, and to be honest, the original poster's attitude seems whiny and selfish to me.
Remember, this is healthcare: people will get sick and injured on distressingly inconvenient schedules. Also, the folks doing the real work (docs and nurses) are highly paid professionals that don't think twice about having to get up and do thier job at 3 AM two hours after pulling a long shift. (That's a legitimate reason, I think, why docs and nurses are entitled to big bucks. Lawyers are a mystery.)
In short, recognize that the work simply must be done, and if you are not up to it, your administration can and should find someone that is. I hate to say it, but if your management hired me to give an opinion on the circumstances as I understand them from your posting, my advice would be that their core business is healthcare, and the entire IT staff is hired help, and should understand that they either play with the team or "get traded."
Finally, like it or not, healthcare IT has never paid well and will never pay well compared to other industries, but it offers one of the most interesting and rewarding working environments in the world. (The average hospital has an IT complexity equivalent to a very large corporation.) If you're just after the bucks, you're certainly in the wrong place.
Oh, and remember: There is no indispensable man.
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
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.
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.
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 -*-
No, it depends on the job description. What the work week understanding is is.... whatever you agreed to. I think that people should have the right to negotiate for almost any terms to their employment contracts. If someone wants to agree to work a 40hr week, or a 50hr week, or a 30hr week, and they find an employer who agrees, why not?
The question of whether or not you're being exploited is then whether or not the employer is compensating you fairly (and whether or not you entered into the contract freely or under coercion, which is a separate issue). You get to decide for yourself if what you're getting for your contribution is fair. If you agree to a job with a default 40hr work week, but wind up working more hours without pay, well, you're getting screwed. If you agree to a job with a 60hr work week, and get the agreed upon compensation, then no injustice is happening -- your agreement to a crummy contract is not a crime.
A job which upfront specifies carrying a pager or being on call, and in return pays a salary of above market rate is hardly "carrying a pager for free".
-*- Any technology indistinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced -*-
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.
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.
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)?
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."
That would work fine for another industry, but it will not work if people's lives are on the line at this hospital. Imagine a doctor giving some guy a medicine that they are alergic to, because the doctor couldn't access the records, and you weren't there to help them...
Doh!
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.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
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"?
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
Where the FUCK is my boss.
Brb.
One of the guys at my job when he was hired requested that an addendum be added to his sign on aggreement (he was perm) that if there was any pager duty his wage would be renegotiated. At the time, his job didn't require a pager. A few months later, his boss said "We need you to carry a pager". He responded "You need to look at my contract, my wage needs to be renegotiated." The boss got a little angry I believe and sure enough when he looked at the workers contract, there it was. The nasty addendum he had forgotten. Long story short, he didn't have to carry a pager.
I thought that was a cool idea.
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.
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.
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.
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'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
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