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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."
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
After 3 months of that crap, I quit in infrustration!
As well you should have. I was working under the assumption that folks in an unworkable situation would move on to another job. What I got from the author was that the rest of the job was fine and the only problem was being on-call.
if you were stupid enough to provide pager duty during your honeymoon - you deserve the divorce you're probably headed for.
{grin} My wife, who works for the same company, brought her pager, too. We were gone two weeks and didn't get a single page. Before departure, we each thought about the problems that might arise in our respective departments and wrote procedures so that pages wouldn't be needed.
Would you hire a plumber that wouldn't warranty his work? If you spent $65,000 a year on a piece of software, wouldn't you want 24/7 support from the vendor?
I take great pride in my ability to do my job well. When I put together a server, I will stand behind the work I've done. I'm responsible for several mission-critical databases. If I have an hour of downtime between 18:00 and 01:00, there is a good chance that my newspaper will miss publishing. We haven't missed a single newspaper in 124 years.
We won't miss a day on my shift. My systems will not be what causes us to break a 124-year 'uptime'.
I stand by my earlier statements. I don't think any of us make minimum wage. If you're not making more than $20 an hour and are required to be on-call 24/7, maybe you have a complaint. However, if you're a typical IT worker grossing more than $40k and are required to carry a pager, I don't think you have a leg to stand on. It's part of your job.
If you are getting paged a lot such that it is interrupting your life, you need to look at what you can do to change the situation. Are you being called about the same problem over and over again? Do you have a procedure the help desk can follow? Have you automated failure detection and remediation? What have you done to fix the problems? If you can't change the situation, you may need to change jobs.
I see a pager as a warranty. If you're not willing to be on-call 24/7 to stand behind your work, I'm not sure I want you working for me or with me.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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