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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?)
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
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 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