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Should You Be Paid For Being On Call?
theodp writes "Fortune's Dear Annie takes on the case of poor Dazed and Confused, an independent webmaster who's expected to be on call for his client at all hours of the day and night, but doesn't get paid for being on call, only for the 40 hours a week that he's in the office. Surprisingly, Annie throws cold water on the contractor's dreams of paid OT, citing these pearls of wisdom from an attorney who's apparently never had the 'privilege' of being a techie on call: 'Many companies see the on-call issue as analogous to a fire fighter's job. Most of the time, a fire fighter is off-duty but on call, hanging around the firehouse, cooking, sleeping, or whatever. What that person really gets paid for is the relatively small, but crucial, amount of time he spends walking into a burning building with an ax. A webmaster, likewise, has slow times and busy times.'" What on call policies are you used to working with and how should it work in an ideal world?
Here's the way I see it. Mr. Lawyer, you want to pay for support 40 hours a week? I'll give you a cellphone number I'll answer 40 hours a week.
It is ridiculous to presume that offering the opportunity to interrupt one's life at any time, any place, with an overriding obligation to deal with your problems, has no value.
Oh, you want the 168 hour phone number? Well, that's gonna cost ya...
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Lots of companies used to give pay or comp time in exchange for on call duty, back in the days when the It staff was considered an asset rather than an expense. Those days are over.
Back when I was hourly, I got paid 2hrs for being on call for the weekend, plus any time spent working. Now that I'm salary, they can abuse me all weekend for free.
You're basically hooked to a pager, which means you need to be near a phone, and usually near a computer with internet connectivity.
I don't work in operations, but everyone in decent places I've worked at did get paid around 3hours of salary per 24hours of wearing the pager. Then it was a minimum of 1 hour per "call" (more like issue, as it could involve multiple calls) except for the first one of the day which was included in the 3hours.
That meant that in a typical week you'd get paid for (24*7)-40 hours of "pager duty", which amounted to 16 hours of salary, so 2 days extra. That's pretty good, assuming you're on a decent rotation and don't have to be THE guy doing it every single week.
I get paid for the time I work, on an hourly basis. 5 minutes over the hour? Well that's one hour I bill for, just like you mr lawyer.
where labour laws apply to everyone but them.
so, question for the lawyer: you're called by a client at 0200 am regarding a contract dispute in southeast asia; at what rate do you bill them? hourly? or do you ignore the phone and get back to them in the morning because it just wasn't 'critical' to you?
Obviously, with all else equal, the guy who is 40 hours + on call needs to be paid more than the guy who is 40 hours only, unless we want to go back to the good old days of indentured servitude or something.
However, it doesn't really much matter exactly how that extra money is delivered. It could be that "The job description of 'Job A' includes being on call, which is why people who do it earn a hefty salary" or it could be "'Job B' is 9 to 5; and time on call is X dollars/hour outside of that". That seems to be the point of confusion.
We have many jobs on then the guy spends many time on "standby", but is crucial on problems without date or time to occur. Police, firemen, the army, civil defense (I work for then), etc etc.. And keep the good work job and stay sharp, guys.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
As someone who is a web developer/webmaster web-whatever-you-want-to-call-it. At most of my jobs I spend most of my 40 hours a week busy. Doing work. When I have done systems administration, it's been the same thing. I am 90% busy those 40 hours per week. There are VERY little slow periods, unlike a Fire fighter (not to dis fire fighters) who spend most of their day waiting to be called to work. If I work 40hrs during the week, and then get called in 3-4 nights because something is acting up, in a way that wasn't expected, I should get paid for being on call, or the employer should wait until I am in during the morning. Mister Lawyer. Until you are in my shoes, please politely STFU.... Thanks
...salaried or not.
If you are salaried, you accepted a position for fixed pay, fixed pay for all the responsibilities of that position (usually.) If you're hourly, you should be paid for the time you're in action during your on call period. If being 'on call' is seriously intrusive to your everyday life then you should discuss, before accepting the position, whether or not that results in some form of recompense (monetary or otherwise.)
Presuming he/she is salaried, you can't complain about it after accepting the position. You can attempt to re-negotiate your employment contract or quit.
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You insensitive clod!
Set your phasers on "funky"!
On call is done in week long shifts. Basically from monday at 8:30am until the next monday at 8:30am, you are on call. After that, it switches to the next technician in the rotation, and so on. During that week you put in your regular hours (8:30-5:30) but you're also expected to handle customer calls that may come in in the evening/early morning. Afterwards, you are compensated either $150, or a day of comp time that can be used like a personal day whenever you choose (some blackouts). Its not bad, its not great, but it works pretty well. Going to be on call next week actually, and since most of the end of this month is blacked out, I'll be enjoying the 150$ to help buy xmas gifts.
I tried this once, but I hated being on a leash so much that I quickly found another job. It just wasn't worth my sanity.
Geeze, it's not rocket science.
Don't like being on call? Quit. In this economy it'll be real easy to replace you - good luck finding another job, though.
It's NOT me! It's the meds! I'm on 1000mg of Fukitol.
You want the opportunity to use my services at your convenience? Pay me a retainer equal to X hours a month. I work any more than X, you pay me an hourly rate. I work less than X, you still owe me for those hours.
I can speak from second-hand experience (my mom is a nurse) that nurses get paid when they are "on call", even if they are never called in. This was back in the 90's though.
"I'm not sure I like the fugnutish tone you used in your post!" -RogL (608926)-
Well, the firefighter mentioned is flawed - he is *at work* waiting for a call to come in. On call is not at work, but available should the shit hit the fan.
The hospitals I worked in, the staff that were on call (CAT scan techs, nuke med techs, OR nurses, recovery room nurses, dialysis folks) were paid $1 or $2 per hour just for carrying the beeper. Should they get called in, they were guaranteed 2 hours of pay, but they had to stay waiting for something to do for that whole time (a CT tech could come in and scan someone in 10 min - but they then had to hang out and wait for the extra hour and 50 minutes). This pay was at regular pay rates/levels, so night shift differential or holiday differential kicked in, as would over time if their total for the pay week was over 40 hours.
So... followign this, our poor over worked web master would be paid say $1/hr for totin his beeper or whatever. If he gets called, he comes in and fixes the issue, gets a minimum of 2 hours of work at his hourly rate, and probably gets over time. Sounds good. In reality, he's probably a salaried employee, so over time is out the window, and if he's lucky he may be allowed to leave 15 minutes early on Friday to make up for it.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
Firefighters) run shifts, they are only ever on call when they are at the station, which they have two 12 hour day shifts, two 12 hour night shifts, and then 4 days off. Pretty fair working conditions if you ask me. No 40 hours in at the station, and then an expectation that they will get up at 3 o'clock in the morning cos Mrs Jones' left a candle burning and the cat knocked it over. Maybe Mr Lawyer need's to check who he is comparing with before he accidentally agrees that 24/7 is unfair.
My company has a great on-call system. You're on call 1 out of 8 weeks, and get paid $50 a day to carry the pager, which really means "forward SMS monitoring messages to your cellphone." It's also nice because we run Linux so our systems rarely have issues. It's basically like getting an extra $350 every other month for nothing.
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
My wife is an OR (operating room) nurse who is paid to be on call, which I would consider to be roughly analogous to this topic. However, there are a couple of major differences:
1. She has to go to a specific location (the hospital) when called in. It's not like she can do her job from home.
2. She's paid hourly.
3. Usually if she gets called in, someone is dying. I would rarely, if ever, classify an IT emergency anywhere near as important as that.
This is a sig. It is like every other sig in the world, except that it is mine, and it is different.
My company pays 10% of the usual hourly wage for everyone who is on call. When a call comes in, the rate jumps to the usual hourly rate. If this makes you work more hours than agreed upon in your contract, an overtime percentage is added.
As a person who works closely with on call groups but not on call himself, I can say that were I tasked to now be on call, I would expect compensation as such. We pay our employees a normal wage but if they work a later shift, they get a "travel allowance" that most just use as additional income. The federal government also gives a bump in pay adjustment to jobs who work to the tune of 50hrs instead of 40hrs.
Meaning if you go from 40hrs to 40hrs + "We can call if we need you" you should then therefore be given a higher overall wage to compensate your time focused on work.
Expected on call 24 x 7 without being paid for it? I don't think so. I value my free time too much for that. How can you ever go fishing, hunting, camping, or be at a movie if you're expected to answer the phone?
The firefighter is not really paid for that small but crucial amount of time that they are in action. They are paid for the time that they're hanging around the station house unable to do anything BUT respond to fires.
Annie has this one wrong, very wrong
Well, the government doesn't describe it as eligible for overtime, at least for police and dental assistant examples. I think it boils down to you get everything you can negotiate for.
http://www.opm.gov/flsa/table.asp
F-0083-06-01, 12/11/97,
Police
* Call-back time
* Electronic devices
* On-call duty
* Pager
* > Standby time
Time in on-call status is not hours of work under FLSA
...and that's why you'll be hard pressed to find many technical jobs that aren't salaried. They are out there, but they're rare as hens' teeth. Also, your theory doesn't hold true if someone is hired for one salaried position, but then promoted to a different position with on-call responsibilities (which happened in my case).
A quick remote login to redirect to a static "We are experiencing technical difficulties, please stand by" page. Then fix it on the next work day.
Or an agreement for comp-time or $xxx.xx for work outside of normal work hours.
"Kittens give Morbo gas!"
I would say there is a mental tax that is paid with the notion of always being on-call. That tax must come at some cost in salary to the worker. Maybe a 40hr/week salary plus 10% for always being on-call.
The ability to drop what you are doing to help someone that occurs outside of a small regular interval is something that is not easy to do mentally and its logical that such a requirement would afford extra cost in salary.
The problem is that, when you're "on call", your time is not your own. You're expected to be ready and able to drop everything at a moments notice and go to work, immediately. Furthermore, you can be limited as to where you can go, particularly in areas with poor cell phone coverage. Most employers I've worked with have given a day of "comp" time in exchange for a week on-call, although they've sometimes been a bit sketchy on actually doing this and on how you should report it. To me, it should be official, recognized, and fully compensated--but often it just happens at manager's discretion.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
Putting IT employees on salary is considered THE WAY to get around paying for on-call hours.
Personally, I expect some time away from the job. I don't answer my work cell phone, including emails, before 8am or after 6pm. I do listen to voicemail and monitor the email for a true emergency, but if it is not my definition of an emergency it can wait until Monday at 8am. If I get fired, so be it. I can find another job. I don't live to work, I work to live.
For comp time during the work week/long weekends OR the potential work experience leading to something I could later do as a paid contractor.
Unpaid on-call time should only be used as a stepping stone for something better. If you don't see a better future with a company that may treat you better later or a potential bullet point on your resume, I would not do it.
Radio engineer here.
I get paid OT for on call emergencies.
I'm salaried to take care of the rest of the deal.
Guess which bit Corporate is trying to take away?
Posted as anonymous coward for obvious reasons.
'Many companies see the on-call issue as analogous to a fire fighter's job. Most of the time, a fire fighter is off-duty but on call, hanging around the firehouse, cooking, sleeping, or whatever. What that person really gets paid for is the relatively small, but crucial, amount of time he spends walking into a burning building with an ax.
This is flawed, as in many fire departments or houses there are multiple crews. You've got 3 days 'in the house' then 3 days 'at home' followed by '4 days in the house' then 4 days 'at home.' When you're in the house, you're responsible for any and all calls that come in. So firefighters get paid for the time they are in the house. Just like most people are paid for the time they are in the office, but aren't paid for Saturdays and Sundays.
If he wants to correct the analogy, he should say that firefighters who are in the 'at home' phase, get called in, but don't get paid for it. They do get paid for it, just like Police Officers that work overtime or off-shift.
Since he's an independant webmaster, he should have a contract or support agreement with his clients and all of that should be spelled out so that everyone knows what to expect - if the contract says he's available 40 hours a week within specific hours, then that's when he should be available. If his clients want more support than that, then the contract or agreement should specify what that additional support costs.
Support requirements really aren't given the priority they need... When my boss came to me to get my opinion on trying to commercialize some of the apps I had developed for internal use, my first question was "How are we going to provide support?" She didn't have an answer and the apps weren't commercialized.
Putting the "anal" back into "analyst"...
I've done a lot of independant contractor work and I've hired dozens of contractors, so I'll put my two cents in.
As a independent contractor he gets to choose if he wants to work or not. If he wants to go out of town then go for it, but if they call and you're not available they're going to get someone else. You're not "on call", they just let you know "hey we have some work here if you want it, if not no problem".
Being an independant contracotr for a business just means you are someone they know with a particular skill and they will let you know when they need your expertise in the future. It's the job equivalent of "fuck buddy".
If he got paid for being "on call" as a independent contractor then we'd all have to pay plumbers, lawn mowing guy, electrician, mechanics, and all the other "use you when I need you" people in our lives for being "on call".
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
...and it's just a company's way of being cheap. (They were charging clients for maintenance after all) When I'm on call at my current job I'm paid for it. Not a huge amount of money. Nothing that's going to make me rich, but it is some token compensation for the disruption to your life. Calls are infrequent, but I have to stay 15 minutes from my computer. If I am called and can fix it quickly I'm not paid anything above the on call rate. If it takes more than half an hour I get the usual overtime. It's a fair and reasonable compromise for staying 15 minutes from my computer. In theory I could be more mobile if I bought wireless broadband but as things stand it means I stay home when I'm on call.
What this Annie Fisher lady needs is someone calling her randomly 0-3 times a night for 2 weeks and being told she isn't allowed to go out. She'd soon change her tune.
I don't know how it works in the US, but here in Australia I believe (non-volunteer) fire fighters get paid to be at work regular hours. They aren't paid just for callouts, and they don't tend to "hang around the firestation" in their off duty hours. If US firefighters are only paid per fire that's not right.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
If I'm at work I can't drink, can't go out of state, can't do anything outside of what my boss tells me I can do (basically).
If I'm no longer on the clock, I can do whatever I want (basically).
If I'm asked to be on call, I have to mold my "not on the clock" time to whatever my boss requires. I can't go out of state. I can't go to an amusement park with my kids. I can't go to a movie. Well, not unless I don't mind up and leaving to go home and sign on the laptop.
If your boss expects you to do x or y while you're not on the clock, you _are_ on the clock and deserve pay for it. The only time I allow my boss to dictate what I can and can't do is when he's paying me to allow him to boss me around.
Firefighters aren't just "hanging around the firehouse" when they're not putting out fires. They spend that time maintaining equipment, training, performing building inspections, and a lot of other duties. I'm sure municipal policies vary, but I'm certain that many firefighters work regular shifts, and when an emergency call extends beyond their regular shift they are paid overtime.
Proverbs 21:19
- If you are in salary, then there is an expectation of being on call. How you work out the benefits of being on call (flex time, on call stipend) is between you and your employer.
- If you are a contractor, you are paid by the hour and all work, regardless of whether it is in the office or at home gets billed. you can maintain some flexibility with this (ie: don't charge travel time, charge at a reduced rate for things you are learning etc).
The employer can't have its cake and eat it too. There needs to be a middle ground. If they are refusing to budge, then find employment elsewhere. Its always easier to launch into a job job when you are already working so get your resume updated and start looking.
Feed the need: Digitaladdiction.net
> What on call policies are you used to...
Whatever is in the contract I agreed to.
> ...how should it work in an ideal world?
I should be paid an infinite amount of money for doing nothing.
When my father was "on call" for Michigan Bell he got his regular wages for his regular 40 hours plus double-time for the time he put in when actually called out (but of course he had a contract).
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I have a 40-hr work week, and I'm also part of a rotation amount our team... everyone gets the support cellphone a night a week (once every 7 days)..
We are paid for this time, even if the phone does not ring at all, but since we can't just go to the movies or have the night off 50 miles away, but the hourly rate is different from our usual salary (about 1/5 of the value). However, if the phone *does* ring, we then get paid as usual overtime (which is anything from 1.0 to 2.5 times the hourly rate, depending on the time of the day and the day of the week), minus the on-call rate (since when we do answer the phone, we're not on standby anymore). The clocks starts when we answer the phone, and ends when the problem is solved, after I hang up the phone or hand it off to the next person, or whoever should be awaken by that problem.
Everything is computed in 5-minute increments, in case anyone is left wondering.
I feel, from my experience working on both sides of the table, that this is a fair way of getting reinbursed for our problems. The tricky part of this setup is knowing WHEN to ring the phone, so the standby sysop does not get woken up at 3AM because some random luser filled their shared storage quota with pron while working on the night shift.
"No."
I will not allow my home life to be subject to the whims of my employer. If that gets me fired from my job, so be it. Let them find someone desperate and/or spineless enough to trade away the entirety of their private life for a paycheck.
I understand completely about the need to support yourself and/or your family, and that doing so often requires great personal sacrifices. But at some point you have to draw a line in the sand and say enough is enough. Personally, I would move in with my in-laws and ride a bicycle to work rather than allow an employer to dictate the terms of my private life. Some things are simply non-negotiable.
100 percent of wrong. Firefighters are not off-duty when they are on-call. They are on-duty. When they go off-duty, they are no longer on call. Firefighters are typically on-duty for a 24-hour shift for two or three days a week. On their off days, they are not on call. Thus, most of the time, a firefighter is NOT on call.
On-call duty is to be paid, end of story. Anyone trying to sell you otherwise is trying to save money at your expense.
That said, of course it isn't paid at the same rate as a regular work hour. After all, you can spend it dozing, surfing the web for porn, fighting with your loved one or going shopping.
The alternative for the company to having someone on call is to have someone there, on the clock. Obviously, that's a lot more expensive. Since they're a company and trying to make a profit, they'll try to get things as cheaply as possible, and free if at all possible. That doesn't mean you have to give it to them for free. Next they'll be asking for free overtime, and then if you'd mind not being paid at all.
Really, I'm not being sarcastic. They are essentially asking you to work for nothing. It's not much work (carrying a cell phone and picking it up if it rings), but it's work.
And don't let them fool you with examples of other jobs. There are some jobs where being on call is so standard that it's figured into the regular salary. That doesn't mean it's free, it's just not explicitly listed on the paycheck. And of course firemen get paid for the time they're waiting for an emergency. After all, that's why we have professional firefighters - to have someone ready to come at a moments notice. And if you check their contracts, they certainly don't say "a work week consists of 3,5 hours inside burning buildings and 1,5 hours rescuing lost cats", but much more likely something like "a work week consists of 40 hours".
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
1. She's an independent webmaster.
That means she ultimately accepts the billing rates and service conditions.
If you want to be a cowboy webmaster, part of your burden/joy is defining the scope of work and setting a price for that scope of work.
There are plenty of customers willing to haggle to the last dollar, be eternally late paying only after many calls trying to get your AR current and demanding services that aren't explicitly spelled-out as 'free.' In order not to feel exploited, the cowboy webmaster needs to better manage her expectations and the client's expectations. I'm not saying 'suck it up' or 'screw the customer.'
This is an opportunity for the webmaster to work out some service-level tiers and related pricing. She'll have to take her work up a notch when she's servicing the customer, but figure out what that looks like in the form of an SLA. If she doesn't want to do this, then maybe being a cowboy webmaster isn't right for her.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
... and the terms you agreed to when you took the job. The usual deal is that being on call is covered by your salary but if you actually get called out you get more paid for it, usually a standard fee per call rather than an hourly rate. There is usually an on call rota as well so you are not on call 24/7.
But in California I was always payed 2 hours for responding to a page, just carrying the pager was considered a 'better' alternative to requiring after-hours onsite staff. This was a large financial institution, and I was a Unix Systems Engineer, one among 8 or 10. Once I moved to a smaller venue, ie development lab and system support, the pager time dramatically decreased and was swapped with comp time as it arose. I don't think you are going to get payed up front for carrying the pager but you DO have a right to get payed if a response is required, and if you are required to remain within a certain distance from home or work you might have a valid issue as well.
http://www.gotovertime.com/facts.html#myth_comp
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Where I work, we get $0.50/hour for being on-call. We get paid no extra for actually getting called. So I could end up driving into work at 3am and spending the next eight hours there, all at a third-world pay rate. It's legal to pay us less than minimum wage because we are "exempt," whatever that means. Sounds like some bullshit.
Yes, I'm looking for a better job.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
You're not already being paid for being on call?
It holds true even if you're simply given the added responsibility without a change of position. Don't like your position at your company? Renegotiate or leave. You're not entitled to some sort of 'automatic pay' increase just for being on call.
I'm the CTO of a small software company. My board can, and often does, call me at all hours of the day and night. I find myself spending quite a few Sundays or Saturday nights flying out early to meet with the board prior to important 3rd party meetings, I don't get paid extra for this, but I certainly considered this possibility before accepting the position and I made sure that my compensation package reflected these 'hardships.'
In addition, as you've pointed out above, specific types of positions tend to come with 'on call' responsibilities, it is unusual for someone to suddenly get saddled with the expecatation that they should be 'on call' outside normal business hours (although it does happen, and has happened to me.)
It, as usual, comes down to the simple fact that when you negotiate a salary you need to base your acceptance upon the possibilities not just what's down on the job description because those job descriptions are rarely written by people who know what they're talking about (sadly.)
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A webmaster, likewise, has slow times and busy times.
Bullshit. Any tech employee will have busy times and OH SHIT times.
In the current economy, few companies are willing to pay IT employees for being on call while many IT employees are happy just to have a job and will bend over and spread their legs for the company. This is just an unfortunate consequence of there being too many people and not enough jobs.
I worked at Big Blue in the 90s, and they had a fixed rate per "shift" for being on-call, they called it "standby". Though, at the time, I was the first one in the particular office who said, "How much do I get?" when asked to carry a pager.
This money was very, very appealing right out of University. Six years later, since the rate is independent of your salary (or even salary band or rank... actually or even inflation), it didn't seem quite so impressive.
An "on-call" shift cannot be a shift where you are otherwise expected to be in the office. (Or working normally, given the "flexiplace" work at home plan.) Should you actually get called, then you bill time worked, in addition to the standby pay for that shift. Compensation rates follow the normal overtime rules for your jurisdiction. (Time-and-a-half, with a four hour "deductible" for Ontario. So your first four hours of overtime aren't paid.)
My PERSONAL rule is, as long as I have to worry about the company needing me, they need to be paying something. Like if I can't go out Friday night and get drunk, they need to be paying. (Normally, I'd expect being sober by Monday morning is no problem. Being sober for an emergency page at 1 AM Saturday morning.... not so easy.)
Or if it interferes with vacation plans or anything like that. Or even being able to go see a movie.
Rule is, you want work, you pay for it.
Way I see it, I'll take the pager and be on call, but the rule is, as I am a contractor, you pay standard-with-full-access rates, minimum 2-hour callout, every time that sucker goes off outside times I'm at the office. (You're paying already when I am at the office.) I bump my standard rates a bit to cover the possibility of interruption, if you want me to be available at any time. If I were an employee, any time that sucker goes off outside office hours, local labor laws say you have to pay me overtime, and a minimum of four hours if I get called into the office. I'd be willing to drop that to a minimum two hours of double time, from four of time and a half.
The fireman idea is flawed, because it is, in fact, not an on-call situation. You are paid for the time that you are on call, but you are actually in the fire hall while you are on call. Your shift ends, you close the door behind you, and nominally you are done. You don't have to worry about being waked up for an emergency call out, when you're off duty. It's much closer to the situation of a volunteer firefighter, who is on call 24/7 because there is nobody else and who is doing it basically out of altruism. Because of its volunteer nature, that doesn't apply either; you're not volunteering at your job.
A fireman has slow times and busy times, he is not working 9-5 and then on call, he's just on call.
A web master has an 8 hour a day busy time, and then an on call time. Every job that I have worked in the tech sector or have had working people for me who were not salaried had on call pay.
They had a bonus for just being on call, and then where paid when they were actual called with some kind of minimum, even if the call took 5 minutes the pay was for 2 hours.
If it's important enough to wake me up in the middle of the night or keep me away from my family during dinner, it should be important enough to pay for.
If my employer doesn't value my time away from work enough to compensate me, it can wait until morning.
I know the economy is the way it is, and it rough to take a principled stand, but nothing lasts forever. Besides, if your employer wants you to work for free, they are already giving you a not so subtle hint about how much they value you.
It really depends on the laws of your state. People talk about salaried and hourly but you really need to look at if the position is exempt or non-exempt. Plus let's not forget that many, MANY techies have successfully sued for unpaid overtime even though they were technically "salaried" (example: Electronics Arts programmers. Currently webmasters at Wells Fargo are starting a class action suit, which I am a plaintiff in, regarding unpaid overtime). Now if you're a contractor and you're letting the customer dictate this to you, then you need to decide how important (i.e. well paying) a customer they are. But if you are an employee, if you're non-exempt (hourly) then they are likely violating state labor laws by not paying overtime for any hours worked past your normal 40 per week. And if you are exempt then it should be looked at if the position SHOULD be exempt based upon your state labor laws (in IL the amount of autonomy and decision making involved in the job matters in this regard). Also to take into account is if the position does basically the same work as an hourly position. These laws are in place so businesses can't take hourly employees, say "you're exempt now", and not pay the OT work. I would get in touch with your state labor organization and find out how the laws apply to you. BTW, in my current position, we are paid as described above. Despite being exempt, we are paid $2 an hour for carrying a pager, and 1.5x for any hours spent working while "on call"
I'm a contractor, so I've worked for many different companies, 3-6 months at a time. For the last several years I've made it clear, during the initial interview, that I'm not on call 24/7.
That said, the occasional night or weekend work is an expected part of our industry, and sometimes they need people to cover that time. I also make clear that I understand that and will work with it.
My current company has no official on-call policy for my position, but the way it works out, if they call me when I'm not in the office, I'll answer if I'm not doing anything else, or return their calls when it's convenient for me. (I'm a pretty typical nerd, so this works out to most of the time.) If they do answer, I charge them for the time I actually spend working, a minimum of one hour.
If they want me standing by at night or over a weekend, that means I can't go out of town, or even out of the house for long. I'm not visiting friends, and I'm not running a D&D game. Since I've given up plans I may have, they're paying me for that time, even if all I'm doing is sitting around at home playing video games, listening for the phone, and occasionally checking email.
These times need to be agreed to ahead of time, and it won't be every weekend. In such cases, I usually charge them normal rates for about half the hours I'm on call, or all of the hours if I'm actually working the majority of that time. (If I'm sleeping, I'll only charge anything if they actually do call.)
So far, as long as I've stated what I expect up front, I've not had any complaints.
If the masses can keep you down, you're not the Ubermensch.
Like it does in NZ:
Your company cannot *oblige* you to do overtime. They can request it, and would be required to pay you overtime for those periods during which you are on call.
It doesn't really matter whether you're working or not: if they want you to be available, they pay you for the time you make available.
You don't have to agree, and they can get in a world of hurt if they try to pressure or force you.
I work at a company where we have on-call rotations, with pager and everything. It was made explicitly clear during the interview and hiring process that this would be expected of me, and that I should consider my salary as reflecting this responsibility. Given that the salary was a good deal higher than typical jobs in the area, and expectations were stated up-front, I felt that this was fair.
If you're an independent contractor, then you definitely should be paid for those on-calls. Its unfathomable to me that someone can expect you to work without proper compensation.
When I worked at RSA Security in their tech support department, we were paid $300 to be on call for the weekend, meaning carrying the company cell phone and being no more than 30 minutes from some way to handle a support case (VPN to the office was fine). For each call/case we received (I think) $75. Overall a pretty good deal for people handling products like ClearTrust, FIM, or Keon; not so good for the SecurId guys, who could make $1,000 on a busy weekend by working full time. They were guaranteed to get a bunch of cases; we weren't.
One amusing story a SecurId guy told me: There was extra pressure on them to handle cases quickly because, when you get fired, one of the first things they do is de-activate your token. If the server crashes on a Sunday morning, everyone who tries to authenticate from home can't log in and thinks they've been fired. Monday morning half your company is spamming resumes to your competitors.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
What does the contract say? If support hours and costs are defined, that's that. If not, then it's up to the two parties to work something out.
I'd offer several options. For example:
1) Fixed monthly rate (for answering calls) plus normal hourly rate (for time involved to fix problem) or
2) No fixed rate, hefty hourly rate
3) No fixed rate, sliding scale depending on day and time (normal rate during normal hours to X times after midnight).
4) Combinations and variations of the above (i.e. fixed rate to answer weekend calls, plus hefty hourly rate)
Make sure you are ok with all the options, then by giving a choice, the client at least feels they get to choose what is best for themselves.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
Here around (germany) they pay me 1 hour for every 8 hour on call, if NOTHING happen. If something happen, then I get the normal pay for that time (6h-20h), double pay otherwise, triple pay for sunday or holiday day.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
As an employee I never received overtime pay for being on call or overtime, though I always got comp time.
Technically contracting and consulting are not the same thing.
As a contractor, I've always been paid by the hour for a specific time span, when the contract expired it was extended or dropped. As far as support, I didn't get paid unless I was actually called in - my contracts always stated terms and rates. On some contracts there were ceilings on the amount I could bill.
As a consultant (current situation) I have specific deliverables, and scheduled dates for delivery. I'm paid a fixed amount for the work, with the final payment held until the acceptance conditions are met. My contracts usually include a support rider as well, for 6 months to a year after acceptance. further support requires a new contract. In any case there's no payment unless there's a problem. If I'm called in and the cause of the problem is determined not to be a "fault" in what I've delivered, I'm paid at a specified rate, otherwise, I eat the time.
...carrier dead.....
If you are on call beyond 40 hours per week and unless you were retarded to have taken the job knowing you're not gonna get paid pas the 40 hours then then you have to get paid.
A friend of mine works for a water filtration company, he was asked if he wanted to be on call. He said yes and he get paid double time for the on call and if its on call for more then certain amount of hours it goes up from there.
If the employer wants to make money of me past the 40 hours per week they better pay their share other wise I ain't putting out.
Why the hell would anyone want to be such a slave?
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
If you are expected to have a response and fix things, then you need to be compensated for it. We used to not have a system and boy did it suck. Even with out getting "On Duty Pay", I can still get called. My Mom in Law DIED and I was at a funeral and I sure would hate to have someone call me then. Thank god my boss stopped the director in his tracks....
Gorkman
My company is strictly 8-5 M-F, but of course we have to keep email, Web, and database servers online 24/7. My staff and I are "on call" all the time, with a "phone tree" sort of system for people to reach us if there is an "emergency", usually something like a power failure or "I can't get my email!". We are all salaried, so there is no OT. Any time spent on actual calls is rounded up to the next hour (I actually take into account the circumstances and will round it up even more for my staff) and is paid back as comp-time. The advantage of a "phone tree" is nobody has to work vacation or family time around an "on call" schedule, and nobody has to be tied to a cell phone or pager for any length of time. We just make sure that at least one person in our department is always available. It isn't a perfect system, but it works for us.
At my last job I had a choice, I could be on call almost all the time, but work from home and/or have flexible hours. Or I could work a standard shift from the office 9-5. Being on call and work flexible hours wasn't a hard choice. I used the same tools when I was working from home as when I working from the office, an internet connection, a phone, and my laptop. Most of the work I did was remote support anyway (client was far from our office anyway). I'd much rather be on call than tied to desk in the office.
Only if everybody accept it. If not, then they get no support. If tehre is a lot of unemployment, then it will cost your job as other people will probably accept poorer condition, if there is under-employment then they will have to offer more. So really saying it will cost "your job" is really dependant on whetehr you can easily be replaced, and the conjuncture.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
How about this, which I hearby call the Beer Principle (patent pending):
If being "on call" means I have to remain sober the whole time, you need to show me the money.
If being "on call" means I can get drunk in the privacy of my own home and not get in trouble if you call me whilst in my cups, then we're cool.
No, salaried means you get paid for the week - not for the number of hours worked in the week. On call for a weekend - take two days off. You're 100% entitled so long as your work is getting done. You see "salaried" goes both ways though most people are too timid to take advantage of it...
I don't understand this: it seems to be a US thing, but we don't get it in Australia and this confuses me.
How is it that salaried employees do not get paid overtime in the US?
In much of the world, a salary is paid for a set period (usually 40 hours), and time over that earns overtime pay regardless. You can't be required to do overtime: but if you choose to do it you get paid a minimum of time-and-a-half.
I work for a company, and I get paid a salary, like most other FTEs in the company as far as I know; no overtime, no extra payments, no matter how many hours extra per week, evenings and weekends included, trying to satisfy the demand for advice.
I trust my colleagues not to call me at 02:00 unless it's urgent - and if it is urgent enough to wake me up, then, it's probably urgent enough for me to give it some attention, in the same way that, if I were working abroad, or working into the early hours trying to help someone. Sometimes, especially in an international business, work cannot always be fitted between 08:30 and 17:15, or whatever "standard office hours" might be.
However, perhaps I'm fortunate that I have a job which I thoroughly enjoy, which allows me to make more headway with my interests in open source, keeping an eye on the state of copyright regulation, and many other things, than I'd be able to do on my own, and am fortunate to work in an environment which supports flexibility - if I'm working all night, I'm not likely to be in early the next morning, unless it's absolutely necessary for me to do so. The (rather regular) anti-social / late / long hours are one factor in an equation.
Lawyers are nothing special, even if some consider themselves to be, and, when a critical system goes down, someone in IT is likely to be far more "special" to you than I am. Unless you just want to be told to try turning it off and then on again...
My board can, and often does, call me at all hours of the day and night. I find myself spending quite a few Sundays or Saturday nights flying out early to meet with the board prior to important 3rd party meetings, I don't get paid extra for this, but I certainly considered this possibility before accepting the position and I made sure that my compensation package reflected these 'hardships.
Ummm, doesn't that sentence contradict itself. I don't get paid extra but I made sure I got paid extra thus you do get paid extra. However, I agree with your first point renegotiate or leave. I took a job with a real stinker of a company a few years back. I was lead to believe during the interview process that the systems where stable and well maintained and call in's where seldom. Then my phone started ringing every weekend and I wasn't given the time or resources to address the fundamental flaws causing the issue. I bailed.
There's training, equipment and station maintenance, and the various public relations/education events.
I worked as an independent contractor for years, and at one point also ran a business that hired six independent contractors in three states, so I have some experience with these matters, though IANAL.
That said, if the employer dictates the hours, provides the workspace, and the tools to do the job, then this person is likely a statutory employee under law. Just because you have an independent contractor agreement doesn't mean you're automatically an independent contractor. Independent contractors must have a certain level of autonomy. Some employers try to use independent contractor agreements as a way to get around payroll taxes, but if they get caught, they'll pay far more in back taxes and fees than they ever would have incurred by maintaining someone in employee status
That said, if the person is a contractor, then s/he screwed up if the contract didn't address on-call or after-hours duties. It would have been reasonable to include a per-incident fee for all after-hours calls, and/or a different rate for night and weekend work. Chalk it up to a learning experience, and submit a new contract for review if you want things to change. You'd best be ready to walk if you plan to do that, however. The employer does not need to accept any new contract. I sure hope you listed a contract renewal period, or process for ammendments and changes.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
We rotate weekly on-call duties between 8 people.
A week of on-call gets you one extra vacation day. Some weeks you might get 1 or 2 15 minute calls. Others might have you working all night.
It all evens out in the end and an extra 6 vacation days is worth it.
An employee is paid for being on call...it's called a salary. A contractor on the other hand is paid for work when called in but not for being on call. If a contractor wants to be paid for being on call he/she should negotiate this up front. I suspect however they will learn the realities of the market take precedence and the job will go to someone who doesn't demand to be paid for being on call.
When I was on call for fixing nortel meridian and ericsson md110 phone switches remotely I got paid for having a cell phone on when I had it. So a customer could call at any hour and I would have 30 mins to get to work no matter where I was located so I could login to their systems and do what was needed. I was paid special overtime for this, which didn't pay as well as the normal 100% extra hour salary. I think it was 20-30% extra if nothing happened and 70ish% extra if something happened. Phones has to work so I guess people tend to pay a bit more then for a website person on call, which is wrong considering some companies live off of their website.
A friend of mine had 100% extra on his boss webservers, but that was because he had built it from scratch and was probably the only one who could fix any problems in the time his boss wanted it to be fixed.
In my opinion, this Annie should be paid atleast 50% her normal salary when she is on call. This is something which should be in the contract with her employer. If the website is so important so she can't fix it in the morning, then it means it's also important enough to pay for on call service.
You should get paid but I haven't found one place I worked as a salaried (exempt) software engineer that will pay you. I was on call 24/7 for a good 10+ years without pay. When I was hourly I was paid because I was non-exempt. I have been woke up in the middle of the night countless times by people calling from Asia or Europe.
My boss in a ridiculously small s-a-a-s co. would frequently call up at all hours and
on weekends with an emergency problem with the servers, the webapp, or the office IT. Nominally
I was "lead developer". He wanted me to get the alerts hooked up directly to my
cellphone.
Now if somehow he had seen fit to include his tech employees as (even small) partners
in the venture, my attitude just may have been different,
but as it was, I basically let him know at one point that this was extra value to the company beyond
our agreement, and that some form of compensation or compensating time off would be a fair gesture.
This kind of disagreement ultimately led to our parting of ways.
Labour standards for tech workers where I live are way slanted toward the employer. Tech workers
are not included in the normal "40-hour or overtime or flex-time" rules that govern the rest of the
economy, even if we are not given shares or options.
So it is basically up to the employees to stick up for their rights, and it leads to a lot of bad blood
if an employee doesn't agree to be a slave. I guess the companies end up with "willing lackey"
types exclusively.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
1-900-TECHNOW just $2.50/minute!
That's exactly how it should work.
If expected to respond with more than just a phone call (e.g. get dialled in within 30 minutes or onsite within 60 minutes) then should get paid, because this limits what you can do while oncall. That might include staying at home, or abstaining from beer, or cancelling trips out with the family.
At my last job we didn't have an on call schedule but we were generally expected to be accessible to our customers if Something Bad happened. One Friday night, around 7pm, my colleague got one of those calls. He listened to the customer explain the problem, and then proceeded to tell him that he would be best served by calling the manufacturer's support line as he had been drinking for several hours and would probably just make things worse in his current condition. No one could really fault him; he did the right thing by the customer.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
Regardless of 'the way things are,' my take would be a compromise. By putting someone on call, you are restricting their movements quite a lot so there should be compensation. Maybe it's miniscule, like $2/hr. Failing that, being CALLED in should incur a higher cost for the employer. OT or doubletime regardless of whether a person has reached their 40 hours or not. I.e., not paying a person full rate for sitting around their house all day BUT paying a person enough to keep them working for you and at a rate and under conditions enough to keep the employer from abusing said employee.
A very long time ago--between ages 18 and 20--I was the assistant manager for my university's computer lab system. I was paid for 30 hours of work per week and given free pager batteries, and in exchange, I worked 8 hours per week in scheduled shifts at computer lab front desks, and the remaining 22 hours were on-call:
- Taking care of labs that ran out of paper and toner. Clearing paper jams the lab workers couldn't figure out. Cleaning printers that had "toner explosions".
- Opening and closing labs if the workers there didn't have the proper lock/alarm credentials.
- Covering sick workers, and lunch breaks if someone was working alone in the lab.
- In one case, staying in the lab with a female worker until midnight after an irate user made her feel uncomfortable.
In a typical week, I'd work anywhere between 12 and 28 hours, averaging 20, so I essentially got paid a 10-hour/wk bonus for being on call--and getting called on an almost-daily basis. I used my personal pager since I told the boss I'd rather not carry a personal and work pager, and we had a simple agreement:
- As a student-employee, I was a student first, then an employee. I gave the boss my class schedule, and she told me to never skip class for work.
- Notify her if I left town, even for a weekend getaway. She would know not to expect me to be on call, and would reduce my pay accordingly--I was pure hourly with no paid leave.
Four years, one BS, one MS, and one wife later, and I was all grown up with a real job as the sysadmin for a high school. In exchange for absolutely nothing, I was unofficially expected to be on call. Teachers would, one way or another, get a hold of my personal cell phone number and expect me to answer their problems with their home computers. In one famous case, a teacher demanded to know why I didn't answer her phone call, and I told her "I don't answer my home phone". When she asked me how the principal calls me at home, I said "He doesn't!". I would also get called at all hours of the day or night by our burglar alarm monitoring station, since teachers didn't understand the concept of disarming.
I have since left that job, and I'm at a workplace that won't consider me on-call unless they need me to be, at which point I'll get a BlackBerry, a contract, a rotation list, and proper compensation.
100% numeric pager or Blackberry with unlimited data plan and cell service? If I was asked to carry a numeric pager, and work all hours and not get paid I would be out the door. If it was a Blackberry with full data plan and unlimited cell useage, maybe that would be enough for me. I currently get paid $1.50/hr for carrying and nothing for the time I spend if I get paged. I accepted this. I used to get paid $1.50/hr and OT for what I worked but got paged 2000% more. So the company giving me a phone with data at no cost to me plus $1.50/hr regardless if I get paged or not is worth it. If I get paged a lot, I train that group how to fix things so they don't have to page me. If they paid me for OT for responding, I probably wouldn't train people how to fix things as I would want the $$$. So this may be an indication that users require some additional information so the pages don't happen, or at least happen less frequently.
There are so many variables it is really just up to what you want to put up with. If you don't like the situation, find a different one.
Whether it's a salaried or hourly wage shouldn't make a whole lot of difference. I've had both types of role, and in all cases there has always been an incentive or some kind of additional remuneration to do the on-call work over equivalent grades in departments that didn't have to do it. That would either be a fixed allowance for the on-call time, a disturbance allowance per call, overtime, or some combination of the three. Then again, I do work in the EU where thanks to the French we are a little more blessed in our labour laws than those unfortunates in the US seem to be.
The best employer's position I had on this went so far as pay you per hour to be on call (0.5x base wage), a disturbance allowance (1.5 hours wage per issue) and overtime (1.5x base wage, or 2x at weekends/public holidays) while you were working on a call, with wages pro-rated for those of us on salaried pay. That was one sweet deal; if you got a whole bunch of quick-fix issues during your week on the rota, then you could quite easily clear a couple of week's pay for just a few hours of actual work. In return, the company had one of the most motivated and loyal IT teams I've ever worked with, but unfortunately almost zero prospects for internal promotion...
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
I get paid for 40 hours of office time (or equivalent home office time) a week. Anything beyond 40 hours is extra. My hours are flexible, so I can leave two hours early one day and "earn them back" doing scheduled work during the evening or nights. If the 40 hours are already used up during the normal work week, the scheduled work outside normal business hours is extra. Extra in this case means an hourly rate of 200% of your normal rate. Minimum is 2 hours.
Our on call system means aprox. 25% of your hourly rate when you are on call and idle.
If called, the 25% falls away and you are paid similar to scheduled work (meaning 200% of the normal rate). In other companies I've been in touch with, the 25% on call compensation has also been seen as a fixed weekly base pay for the week you are on call or as a on call compensation in 6-8 hour slices that makes smaller on call lumps cheaper for the company.
It might sound much bit here is why it is a good idea to have a high pay for out of hours work:
If you work more than 40 hour weeks you become less productive, less creative and generally more prone to stress as a direct result of the amount of work
Your time away from your loved ones should really cost a lot - I mean - you are already paid to be away from them 40 hours a week - about or more than half of your time awake.
Cheap on call service from the employee will mean that management will use the on call service more often out of hours. If it is expensive - all other things being equal - management will learn to plan better. Remember that management primarily looks at cost - not employee happiness or stress levels.
I work at AT&T and was insourced from IBM a year ago where I had been for 9 years. This is Denmark - Now you know why Oprah thinks we are the happiest on the planet.
In Finland our collective labour contract (IT field jobs) says that all on-call duty time must be paid with half of salary.
So if employer says you must be reachable (and he can't just say that, it is negotiable issue) 24/7, you get paid 40h+(128h/2)=104h/week. I think that's pretty fair. On the other hand all overtime is paid with raised rate (depending on amount, starting from x1.5 normal salary per hour, one hour minimum), so working culture is pretty different from USA/Canada/....
My boss just tells me to come in late or not at all if I am called out. I have no issues with that and it works out well for me. Obviously not everyone has a boss like that and I know how lucky I am.
Here's the key for me. The guy works 40 hours / wk in the office. THAT is what he is paid to do. That is what the EMPLOYER contracts for. This is what the article says.
If he is being paid, by the hour, for 40 hours (also mentioned in the article) then that is ALL he is contracted for.
He should submit bills for at least the time he works when called. I would bill at a rate of 1.5 or 2.0 times the normal pay rate. If they want to play nickel and dime, just play back.
Once they go that route, then they are beholden to a whole new set of employment rules. I'd just let the boss person know that they will be getting billed at the going rate for any off hours support/work calls.
I'd also suggest that the contractor let them know that if this is not acceptable, then they need to prioritize the work when he gets in on the next day.
Of Course in this economy, one can just be happy to have a job, and shut up and not say anything. However, if you know the systems and designs and whatnot for the website well, then being "fired" for not being on call is a risk I would be willing to make, especially if it is a steep learning curve to learn how / why things are setup the way they are. Finding good help is not easy, even with all the unemployed out there.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
on call guy needs to negotiate what it's worth to him or move on.
The real solution for "on-call" is to charge (a ton) for off hours work, so everyone gets paid. It's also a great filter and helps the client decide about what is really important to them.
An answering service works well, too. If the client has to go through someone else to reach the tech, there is another filter to help cover un-needed calls, and the opportunity to have an hour to look into the issue & call back.
I am a programmer analyst at my job and have to be on call. It is in a rotation. I do not get paid extra for it. In fact, I am the lowest paid person on my team. That would be awesome if I got paid extra or got paid the "big bucks" like some of you think, but it does not happen. When I say on call, I mean I have to walk around with a Blackberry by my side that is issued by my company. I want to know what companies you guys work for, because my salary definately does not reflect the fact that I am on call. In fact, when we started going on call on my team, my pay stayed the same.
The world is how you make it
i won't work for no overtime credit. I have always demanded comp time or pay, no exceptions. It's not like i sit idle at work and my managers/bosses know it so never been a problem.
..just because you can, doens't mean you should...
As a software engineer with a real CS degree, I have never been "on call" for anything. I'll leave that shit to the pedants.
When I hired in, they told me there was 6 people on the team, so I assumed at worst a 5 person rotation (carry pager every 5th week; not too bad). Then, two months later, they said no, you are on call 7x24x365. They might be laughing now, but when I leave, they'll be scrambling to fill this position , which already had a high turnover rate! Never was a big fan of unions, but making me reconsider!
If you're on call and expected to be available to fix stuff (or even just to advise) then there are restrictions placed on what you can and cannot do. If there's an SLA involved, and you have to be actively working on the issue within X minutes, then there are even more restrictions placed on what you can do. (No getting drunk, no going too far from a computer & a net connection, potentially no travelling, no going to the theatre (unless you're willing to risk wasting the price of the ticket), don't risk a date unless she's happy to maybe have to cut it short at a moment's notice, no being uncontactable (e.g. out of mobile coverage) etc)
Time with restrictions placed on it is by definition not free time. Time that is not free because of my employer, my employer can pay for.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Back in my early techie years, I was a unionized IT employee at an East Coast university. When pagers started to roll out, our union leadership started to make noise about getting overtime (or added compensation) for carrying said pagers. Long story short, the university system leadership said not only "No" but "H*** No". We didn't strike either.
Fast forward about 23 years and the network group I was in had a rotating on-call pager. For a long time, we would take an extra day off to make up for the fact that we were on-call (answering questions that should never have come to our group). However, that ended with a new manager who said that we couldn't afford to provide these "undocumented" days' off. Our colleagues in a foreign country, however, still receive extra pay for carrying a pager.
Bottom line is, in the US over the last 20-25 years, employers have been squeezing the employees harder and harder even as more jobs go overseas or to low-balling contractors. Unless there is a major sea change in employer-employee relations (and there will not be any time soon), forget about collecting any extras.
I think, therefore I am - Rene Descartes; I yam what I yam, an' that's what I yam - Popeye
If you work in a support field, you are on call. I have worked in data and voice engineering since I was in college and have been required to be on call as the systems you maintain are business critical. One job was not paid however the one I currently am with now pays 3 extra hours of normal wages the week you are on call for the inconvenience and every call that comes in from the automated system that requires work you are allowed to take over time on. These customers rely on their systems to do business so any smart company will pay their employees accordingly to take care of them. Money doesn't help with the pain of being woken up in the middle of the night but you at least get more willing and helpful employees IMO and experience
Bryan
I have seen 3 pay classes for engineers and similar fields(I would count IT).
1) Salaried-Salaried engineers get paid X dollars for 40 hours a week. They frequently work more than 40 hours, but the expectation is that they will work roughly 40 hours. Any extra time(i.e. to finish a project by deadline) is not compensated. This is typically only for people who are expected to do all of their work in the office.
2) Hourly- Hourly engineers are paid by the hour. This typically amounts to the same pay as a salaried employee. However, hourly employees are expected to perform non-office work or they are expected to work frequently for longer than 8 hours. This is frequently the pay rate for engineers who work "on-site" or supervise technicians. This system compensates them for working overtime. Pay is "straight time" meaning that they keep earning the same hourly rate no matter how many hours it takes. This rate is frequent for engineers who travel as part of their work.
3) Billable- These engineers are paid by the hour, but using the standard convention of time-and-a-half, night differential, etc. This is typically only paid to engineers whose time is being directly billed. This is done because the employer doesn't actually pay the engineers, the contracting company pays them. Typically the contracting company is more concerned with the overall time of the project rather than the cost for employees.
As far as the issue of "being on call": I am on call, but I am almost never contacted. If I am "called", I am paid a premium rate. I would think that some bonus would be part of being "on call" for any employee(i.e. nurses being paid $1-$3 per hour) or a penalty paid for being called.
So, there are really multiple bits of information that the slashdot community needs:
1) IS this IT employee only being paid salary?
2) Is he being rewarded for taking a call?
3) Is his base pay increased to compensate for the frequent disruption of his schedule?
Here in Italy, in a good 80% of IT jobs there's no compensation for being on call, since we're all friends. Big friends, especially when the caller has a mobile sponsored from the company and the called has just his own personal one. For example, it's no matter if they call you and when you tell them "listen, pal, there's a doctor here that's explaining me the real name of the cancer killing my mother" you get answers like "ok, but the X thing is not working, we need it asap". We're all friends.
More problematic to me is the fact that they converted a full-time employee to an independent contractor without benefits. This person should take a close look at the definition of "employee" vs. "contractor" and possibly call the IRS and/or the state dept. that handles labor issues. If this employer has the kind of control over the "contractor" that it sounds like, they're still an "employee" and should be treated as such.
On contract, I charge a few bucks an hour, 24/7, for being on call. If a call comes through, my normal hourly rate goes into effect on top of it.
Working with a company, I've had arrangements in the past where we simply traded on-call time for flexibility, some random afternoons off, etc. If you're working with good people who trust each other (as we did) we all felt like it was fair, and things ran smoothly.
I think that as IT pros, we all should make sure we understand what we're getting into before we accept an offer. I for one knew coming into my current position that even though I'm outside my 40 hours, and even on vacation or home sick at times, I still have to be responsive. Technically that means being reachable (i.e. "on-call") 24x7x365...
That said, it's also acceptable to understand that there may be times that I take an extra half-hour at lunch, leave a bit early or come in a bit late. I'm very lucky to have an employer who treats me like an adult and have found that simple discussions with your management can iron out a lot of the issues around being reachable ahead of time.
"Of course I'm wrong... That's how I get to 'right'." - Gil Grissom
It, as usual, comes down to the simple fact that when you negotiate a salary you need to base your acceptance upon the possibilities not just what's down on the job description because those job descriptions are rarely written by people who know what they're talking about (sadly.)
Well I wouldn't disregard the job description. It's not as simple as "what's in the job posting" or whatever, but I assume you went into an interview before you were hired, right? Didn't you talk about the job at that point? Did the interviewer say anything about working outside normal business hours? Did the idea of being on call every come up, implicitly or explicitly?
If it's not a job that obviously requires being on call and at no point in the interview did they indicate that possibility, then I think it's fair to say that being on call "wasn't in the job description". It just wasn't part of the deal you signed up for. That fine, but when an employer asks you to do something that wasn't part of the deal you signed up for, they've essentially reopened negotiation. Negotiate a deal that you find acceptable.
I worked a job where I was on call 24/7. The way it worked is that I would be paid $1 a minute and there was a minimum guarantee of 10 minutes. The client was billed out at $2 a minute with a minimum of 10 minutes. Essentially $60 an hour (taxed of course) went to my pocket. The issue was that it would be Sunday, 7am, and I'd get a call that would take 2 minutes. When I handed the slip to my boss he's like "at least you made a few dollars." My response was "I don't give a shit about $10."
After a point you get tired of it and since there was nobody around to relieve me of on-call duty, I was stuck. I remember one time when we had one other "tech" and I was on-call that week. I had a funeral to attend that weekend and I told the guy that I would be unable to be on the phone for a few hours that day, would he mind taking the phone and when I'm done, I'd take it back. He said "I'm going to a concert" and that was it. No backup from the bosses or anything. I was stuck. So my solution? Leave the phone off. Pretty much that's what I ended up doing a lot of the time when I was fed-up with my job and couldn't get relief.
Also, nobody required any of our clients to have high-speed access so we had to do a lot of remote work via dial-up using VNC or some other solution. Painful doesn't even begin to describe it.
My job now I have a blackberry and we rotate who's on-call between 5 of us. It's not usually bad at all and we all help each other out.
I'm the CTO of a small software company.
And you can stop there. Your job doesn't compare with the job of a regular IT guy. I'm fairly sure neither does your salary.
Yes, some jobs come with extra obligations. In this case, however, they apparently want to add a new obligation to the old job. For free.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I have been contracting since 1992, and one of the reasons I started contracting was unpaid overtime.
If someone calls me, I go on the clock. Nobody should be surprised to get an invoice.
If the job is worth doing, it is worth paying for.
The person in TFA is not acting like a contractor, the employer is risking bad things(tm) should they ever be audited.
In a word, yes you should. As has been said, firefighters are at the "office" and waiting for a call to come in meaning they have all the gear they need at hand to quickly deal with a fire. Likewise when this chap is at work, he has all the gear at hand that he needs to quickly deal with any website issues such as computers, internet connection, mobile (cell) phone etc.
Firefighters aren't expected to be on call and lug a fire extinguisher around with them if they go anywhere so why should this guy be compelled to do the same with a laptop? He can't go out and have a beer with his mates (drunk driving) or go clubbing (can't hear the phone) or even for dinner with his wife/girlfriend/fiance (divorce/dumped). Any employer that thinks someone would or should be willing to do that without being compensated is completely deluded.
I am on call 24/7 for every one week in five for critical issues and I am compensated quite well for being available at all hours of the night and weekend. Anyone that isn't should look for another job and on their resignation letter simply state the reason why. How can this guy be expected to have no social life and not be compensated for it?
There was no question about being paid when you were on call because...it was the military. Then again, being on call was looked at basically as a punishment since it meant that you couldn't go anywhere that didn't have cell coverage, couldn't leave the immediate area, had to drop everything anytime some jackass couldn't get his VPN to work or forgot his password, etc. I've never taken a civilian job that required an on-call rotation, and I never will unless I'm paid accordingly. The notion of 'on-call' in IT has become something that companies take for granted because if you won't do it for free, they can hire someone else who will. The time has come, my brothers, for us to end this outrage!
For the most part, labor laws prevent companies from requiring you to work over a certain number of hours without proper compensation. Some companies will try to force an employee into an exempt status (salary) to avoid paying overtime because it doesn't just cost extra by paying the employee more, it costs extra in payroll. In some states it's illegal to uptitle an employee into an exempt status. I once worked for a company that did just this, and required working long hours and an on call rotation. After I left, I found out they were forced to drop this practice, which resulted in cutting a lot of hours down to normal full time hours as employees are now payed an hourly wage.
It's best to check your local labor laws or talk to a labor lawyer.
Of course, when it comes to contract labor, all of this can go out the window as wage vs salary can be negotiated.
Nope. Never would do it, no one should be asked to do it. My last job that tried to pull that ploy. After they announced that they were bringing that in, I made some calls, did an interview or 2 and when my ex-boss handed me the schedule - I traded him my resignation. The look on his face was priceless.
Part of on-call requires that the person on-call be available, alert and able to drop everything for the period of time needed to fix the issue. That means, you can't buy tix to entertainment events, go to the pub with friends, can't go on a weekend camping trip with the kids or anything similar. You are effectively wearing electronic shackles, much like a convict given house arrest. You probably shouldn't even go out for a nice supper with your significant other, as your expensive meal could be ruined because some dufus at your client's site put the "deny all" statement at the START of the access control list, not the end - inspite of the warning dialog that pops up (which he ignored).
I'm not a criminal, my company doesn't hire folks with a record. Why should I be subjected to similar conditions without compensation?
Why you need unions.
I've been through several systems & it's all about the frequency of the calls.
In my first sysadmin job out on Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands. we got paid 1 hour for every 4 hours on call (had to work that 1 hour if we got called in, got paid straight time after that first hour). The on-call pager rotated around the sysadmins, some people avoided it, others wanted the extra $$$, so it worked out mostly. We ended up getting paged 1-4 times a week, usually during the middle of the night. You also couldn't drink & had to be in a condition/location to respond to a page with 15 minutes & actually get into the office to fix things if need be within 45.
Down range in Afghanistan & Kuwait we worked 12 hours shifts and have 24/7 coverage. If your pet project blew up you might get called (pretty rare), but would get comp time basically.
These days I'm salaried & have to put in 80 hours every 2 weeks. If I get called in, it just counts towards my 80. The only reason we get called in pretty much is the Temperature Guard system paging because HVAC or power failure. Only been called 3ish times in my 10 months so far.
I'm fine with not being paid for my current on-call status, as it rarely affects me. I wouldn't have been fine with not getting paid out on Kwajalein, as you were paged at all hours frequently. They need to pay you appropriately for the level of service they expect.
The other side of the coin, is companies/people will compensate you as little as they can get away with. You need to stand up for your right to get compensated for your work & restrictions on your life by being call.
If I'm going to be required to craft my time around it, then I'm going to get paid for it. Any time I'm on call is time I can't be drinking, out-of-town, or otherwise too busy, which means it's not my time, it's employer time, and they don't get employer time unless they buy it from me. Thems the rules. No pay, no play, and I'll feel perfectly justified in letting them go to voicemail until 9am.
If they don't like that, they can let me go and get someone more amenable to being cowed, or we can work something out[0].
[0] Funnily enough, the latter has happened to me more often than the former.
Hell yes you should get paid for being on-call. Even if it's only an extra 10 to 20 dollars per paycheck.
Comp time also is an acceptable substitute.
I work in IT for an org with approx. 3200 users. There are 5 technicians. We rotate being on call one week of every five. We are payed $2.25 / hour for on call during the week and $3.25 / hour weekends just for carrying the pager. In addition to this any actual work done while on call is compensated at our regular rate x .5 .5 as were were looking at an attrition problem if compensation for being on call wasn't improved. Additionally we got a third party to handle the simple things like password resets and PEBKAC so we now only get genuine emergency cases while on call.
This was just increased from being only paid for actual work done at time x
So at least with my employer there was definitely a value attached to 24x7 support.
Any employer who sees zero value in having 24x7 support is going to have problems keeping staff with such unrealistic expectations. My previous employer were the cheapest bastards on the face of the planet but even they understood that service provided outside of business hours was not to be provided free of charge.
It seems that the people who do not see any value of having support available 24x7 are always then ones who scream the loudest when something breaks a t 3 am.
Make a deal for booking double overtime for time spent at customer calls.
I feel ripped off getting paid 25% for oncall. Oncall sucks and your employer should know that. True fast response time requires you basically stay at home during your on call time. I work in a NOC and do a 12 hour NOC schedule. I get woken up several times a night and the company understands it's a pain. They pay us as we should. If you're expected to work they should expect to pay. Nothing is free.
Tim Smith - Ramblings from Nerd Land
What's this 40 hour a week thing? Was that a typo and he meant to say "day"?
My clients/employer rent my time & I figure it's pretty black & white. Either they pay me and I'm on the clock, or they don't pay me and I'm not.
That said, I'm in the relatively fortunate position that my work does pay me for being on-call, and none of my private clients expect to be able to reach me 24/7.
I should be paid for any time I am required to remain sober for company purposes.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Here in Ontario, there are exceptions to the vacation and overtime rules as they apply to most people.
Specific to this article, an "IT Professional" is grossly vague in it's definition: "... who use specialized knowledge and professional judgement to work with information systems based on computers and related technologies."
IT Professionals are an exception to the generally fair provincial rules in the following areas: Hours of work, Daily rest periods, weekly/biweekly rest periods, eating periods, and overtime.
I once had an employer tell me to my face, "we can require you to work 80 hours per week, with no overtime if we wanted. Be thankful you're only getting 50". Granted, one could probably challenge them in court if they're that malicious with it, as that certainly wasn't the spirit of the labour laws when they were written. But who can afford the lack of a job, as you will almost certainly be fired, legal fees, headaches, etc?
I ended up quitting. Much easier for me.
See page 119 of the linked document (PDF):
http://www.labour.gov.on.ca/english/es/pdf/es_guide.pdf
Paid 1 hour per weekday of being on-call and 3 hours per day on the weekend or stat holiday. This is paid at straight time. If you get called you get paid for what you work at 1.5x the rate. There is a 6 person rotation so you are only on-call once every 2 months or so.
You're on call, you get nothing until you're called in, then you get time-and-a-half or double-time (for a holiday). That's how we do it here.
I have only been a "full time" employee one time.
That deal was simple.
I drew a salary. .25 hours of comp time for every hour I was on call
The days (24 hour period) I was on call I got
If I worked during that time then I got 1.25 hours of comp time per hour worked
The "nights" (after hours) I got .5 hours comp time and 1.5 hours comp for time worked
There where 3 of us and we rotated by the week.
After 18 month on the "job" I had over 250 hours comp time added up when I left.
That is the rate I negotiated with the employer. .1 hour per hour for waiting on the call.
The one I am on now is better.
When I am called I bill 2 to 1 comp time with
-- I am the NRA, enough said...
If you're self-employed, think twice before charging all those hours but charge a fee anyway. If you're not, you make yourself available to the company during off-hours. That takes a huge toll on your life which must be rewarded/taken back somehow. Usually, between an individual and a company, this is done through money. The company must pay for your on-call time, period. For one thing, it'll prevent abuses or you get paid for being abused.
In particular how often and how long. If it is a case of "We need to be able to reach you if a critical system goes down in the middle of the night and this happens maybe once a year," well then maybe you don't need much extra. You are being asked to fix emergencies only, and on a very sparse schedule. However if it is a case of "Users need to be able to call you with any request they have any time of day, and this will happen multiple times a week," well then compensation needs to be much higher.
Now in the case of a contractor, well then it is much simpler situation: You set your rates based on the time of day. For example I do consulting on the side of my normal job. I don't really care to do much of it, so my rates are high. $100/hr 1 hour minimum for evening/weekend times (I don't consult during the day as I'm at work), and you have to call ahead and set up a time with me, I don't run over. You want me to come over at 3am and do so on no notice? Ya ok, but now it is $200/hr plus a $200 service fee, so $400 minimum. For that amount, I'll roust myself out of bed and come fix your shit. Needless to say (or maybe not) so far nobody has been interested which is fine by me because I'm not all that interested in doing support in the middle of the night. However, were they interested to the tune of $400 or more, well that is enough money I'd be interested in doing it.
So with contracting, just set your rates accordingly. Decide how much your off time is worth to you and put a price on it. If they are willing to pay that price, then fine, you give them the service they want. You don't ever tell them "no" you just tell them what it'll cost. Then the choice is theirs if it is worth the money or not.
There are many places where cell phones and pagers don't work. If an employee spends their off time at a concert, a sporting event, or on a boat, they may not be in a position to respond, even IF they get the message. If you want a near-100% chance of getting them to immediately respond, they are essentially under house arrest. For that, they should be paid a "standby" rate per hour with a higher rate for actually responding. For less compensation, we can discuss diminished expectations of availability.
I have had to explain this to several bosses, usually in defense of my own staff. In the world of operations, you can't set specific hours of coverage without specific compensation. Notice management has their own version of after hours coverage. They all have Blackberries and they respond on a "best efforts" basis - without compensation. Not many tears are shed if it takes a few hours to contact a manager. Corporate hypocrisy sets in when management expects better off-hours responsiveness than they are willing to provide themselves.
...and that's why you'll be hard pressed to find many technical jobs that aren't salaried. They are out there, but they're rare as hens' teeth. Also, your theory doesn't hold true if someone is hired for one salaried position, but then promoted to a different position with on-call responsibilities (which happened in my case).
Actually that's changing, at least in California it is. One of the big IT company's I don't remember which lost a big case and we had to restructure our whole department. 90% of the IT staff that was on salary were changed to hourly.
It holds perfectly true, unless employment law is particularily bizarre where you live a change of employment contract will be mutually agreed. Don't want the promotion with on-call? Don't agree to the promotion (and risk being sidelined of course...)
Many jobs treat the higher end technical positions as being salaried. This means there is no overtime, in the way a manager is just expected to do the job, even if it means working late, and still getting no extra money for it. The trade-off is that you don't have people watching over you and micro-managing you since you are in charge of your area of responsibility. If you are in a "grunt" style position where you are under a manager who stays on top of you, you need to make it clear that:
A) you are responsible for your job getting done, meaning you should be left alone to get the job done, but that it means if things break in the middle of the night, you ARE responsible to get them fixed.
or
B) You are "just an employee", meaning you deserve overtime, and there SHOULD be some sort of compensation for being on-call, either rolled into your normal pay, or overtime pay.
In system administration positions, as a responsible point of contact, the admins normally get paid with on-call time being a part of the pay. It is expected, and falls under A. Note that in that type of position, there are others to share the on-call duty with, so you might only be on call for one week out of four for example, and you only get woken up when the on-call person doesn't respond. Again, it is about being responsible and taking charge, or about just being an employee without any sense of responsibility for the service you help provide.
So, where do you find yourself?
on call hours are not charged. So call your lawyer after hours..... better yet call that lawyer after hours.
The only time I've been on-call was with a company with around 8 employees and only one would need to be on-call at once. We would take shifts for one week at a time, and there wasn't pay for being specifically on-call, but any call that we have do act on resulted in a minimum of 3 hours of pay, because that is the legal minimum shift time in Alberta as far as I know. This never really seemed unfair, because it was one week out of 7 or 8, and we were all working together to hold the place together.
To be blunt, I don't care enough about the original article to read it. However, I don't see anybody so far asking this question -
Is Dazed and Confused really bad at his job?
If he uses good programming practices, exactly how many calls is he going to get? Is he using IIS? Bad move. At my previous job we had a customer at one time we provided hosting service only for and they blamed us for all of their IIS related issues, even though we weren't paid to be responsible. It got hacked and it crashed regularly yet it was somehow our fault. I supposed that Dazed might have the case of an insane customer who blames him for things that are not his fault or needs way too much handholding, but still, a properly designed website shouldn't need all that much attention after hours. My previous employer required me to be on call 50% of the time, but the good news was that we rarely got calls outside of normal business hours. Still it kind of sucked. My current job requires me to be on call for about 3 weeks each year. I don't get paid extra for it, but 3 weeks is quite reasonable and if something comes up after hours that takes a lot of time, I can get comp time for it.
This is kind of simple in my mind - as someone who schedules vacations in places with no cell coverage - it been years since I wasn't on call 24/7. I often ask myself why the hell I went into Operations just for that reason. Having said that - here's how I distill it.
Hourly employees - you get on-call differential which equals 10% for each day you are on call + real time worked for taking calls including OT if applicable.
Salaried employees - suck it up - it's part of your job. If you are lucky you aren't a single point of failure and can share your on-call duties with other members of your team.
Management - you are _always_ on call unless you are unreachable at which point you'd better have a named backup.
Its that simple.
"Mr Lawyer" is a dumb a$$ -- I'll just bet you can't call him 24x7 and expect "no additional charges". Get a grip dude.
I'm the "lone" IT guy where I work. Web admin, network engineer, helpdesk. I'm "On-Call" but with the stipulation of "you get me if you get me. If you don't, call our service vendors" ... if I answer a call, I get an automatic hour's pay, and then whatever else is needed after that, plus travel.
So far it hasn't worked out at all.
"You get me if you get me" has been to the company owner "Get him. Get him now. Where is he? This is unacceptable!" and nothing like what we agreed to. I've had to correct them once already when they tried to write me up for neglect and I produced the documented they agreement to defend myself.
As the only person, I can't be reasonably expected to always be on-duty and my manager (nor do I) want me to make updates to her as to when I'll be available. The policy seemed fair until they get bent out of shape.
The moral of the story is - get whatever you can for being on call, and make sure they know the rules apply only when you're on call. Expect your employer to try and abuse it and be firm with them when they do. Set boundaries early and keep them in place.
These are details that should be worked out in advance of any agreement in place. If the agreement did not touch on this aspect then the topic is up for negotiation. If there is mention of being on-call or otherwise being responsible for a certain level of responsiveness during any or other specified times without any specific compensation plan, then you may be screwed.
A mature or experienced business person would know to have these details worked out in advance.
Should someone be paid to make themselves available to deliver a specified quality of service? Yes. If you are paid by the hour, then there should be some sort of component structure built into the agreement somewhere.
Bottom line? If I have to wear a tuxedo to bed because I may be called to a formal party, then someone is going to pay for it.
Being forced to remain in contact, remain sober and live your life with the lingering wonder of being called or inturrepted at any moment is a job in itself. If you are on-call, you should be getting paid for it. I work in tech support for a healthcare system. I am paid hourly, and in a rotation where I am on-call for one week every five weeks. During this time, I am guaranteed $2.50 per hour I am off duty and carrying a pager. If I come in, I get three hours of overtime whether I am here for three hours or five minutes.
FOXTROT UNIFORM CHARLIE KILO
I started to do the math and stopped when I figured the amount of time I spend working on the weekend and after hours was roughly the same as the amount of time I spend posting on /.
If you are my boss reading this, I'm just joking. Seriously though, they let me leave early enough and with lunches and breaks all seem to work out to roughly the same time.
My policy always was, my pager compensation was proportional to the potential impairment of my own agenda.
What I mean is, if you expect me to reply to you within a certain time frame, then I have to be near a phone or within cell coverage. This restricts where I can go. If you expect me to connect in remotely, I have to be near internet connectivity, and most of the time be carrying my laptop with me. This further restricts where I can go, and what I can do when I go there. If you want me to be on site within a certain time frame, that even further restricts where I can go.
If I can watch TV, go to the movies, or out for dinner and still be on call, that's not going to cost you as much as if I have to be within 30 minutes of being on-site from the moment you call me.
Historically, I have been lucky. One employer paid us $500/week to carry the pager with a 90-minute call-back SLA (and then hilariously lost the pager number and refused to admit it, so was unable to call us for 8 months). One customer was quoted something stupid like $5K/week for 7x24, 60-minute on-site (plus hourly when we got there). Any call time was billed back to the client, and we (theoretically) got time-for-time in exchange for that. My current employer has a pager our customers to call, but since it is 7x24 it is optional to be in the rotation and for various reasons I've opted out. In addition to receiving money for your week on the pager here, time is tracked very strictly and we get time-for-time for any pager-call time served.
you should read everything on the internet as if it had "but I'm probably talking out of my ass" appended to it.
at least in California. Hourly paid employees are paid by the hour, regardless of where they are or when the hour is. If you get a salary, you get a set paycheck regardless of the number of hours you work, including answering the phone in the middle of the night on a Saturday. It's very simple. If you don't like being on call, don't take the job.
I always had zero tolerance for non paid standby requests unless an hourly fee was agreed upon. I flat out told employers that I spent time offshore fishing and that getting me on the phone would be impossible.
Yes. The only people who have a different opinion tend to be the employers who are exploiting the people on call, making them work unpaid overtime.
If you take a job and are expect to be on call, then it is assumed by the company that the salary adequately covers the time spent on call. If your job changes and you are expected to be on call, you can renegotiate your pay. If you don't like the offer you could, in theory, leave.
I agree in principle with most of what has been said above... but go find another job if you don't like it. However, in this economy, with unemployment over 10%, be wary of what you wish for. I bet there are plenty of people right now that would take a job with being "on-call" at any wage rate.
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
And does the lawyer offering this advice accept a retainer fee from his clients so that he can be on call for them?
24x7 support is costly in any business. The firefighter is not an apt analogy... Is he expected to work an 8 hour day and THEN be on call for fires?
And is he serious when he thinks a firefighter is paid for only the small amount of time he is out firefighting? If that were the case, I expect we would see a lot of financially insolvent firefighters-turned-pyromaniac in order to put their kids through college.
I try this approach, and it has served me well... I am just good at my job.
I am just generally good at what I do, and try to do as thorough of a job as possible.
Occasionally, there is something that is beyond my sphere of influence, or something that just happens as a natural course. I handle it.
I make sure that my pay is at a level acceptable to my responsibilities...
Instead of resorting to unions, I always make sure I am an asset to my company. I don't have to press very hard at review time to get a worthy compensation adjustment. While I sometimes get a minimal raise of 4% (like this year with the economic environment), I pull off a 15-20% raise about every other year or three. I have more than tripled my income in my 11 years of professional experience.
How can others value you if you do not value yourself?
The complaint reads like the complainer is hoping there is some legal lever they can pull so that they can keep the client but also point to a rule that requires that they be paid for the extra time.
I sure wouldn't keep working for somebody if I thought they were making crazy demands (there are always lots of exigent circumstances in such situations, but damn it, when I say 'keep working for somebody', I don't necessarily mean I would quit right away, but at a minimum I sure would start looking for something else, and if the demand was unreasonable enough...).
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Not that I disagree with the premise of "renegotiate or leave", but it is a bit ridiculous to compare the responsibilities of an on-call tech and someone with a C-level title. As a CTO, you've got a lot more vested interest in the company than the average salaried guy who is not getting the same C-level perks.
Do you have direct reports, are you allowed to make independent judgments important to the business, do you have an advanced degree, or are you a producer of creative works?
If the answer to all the above is "no" then you probably shouldn't be an exempt employee, meaning you would be eligible for overtime which would offset any on-call demands.
There are lawsuits on if programmers are "creative" types (EA & IBM settled I think, so I'm not sure if the government has weighed in officially) but if a "webmaster" role doesn't produce content but is more involved in server maintenance, that should neatly get past that threshold.
I've been on slashdot so long I'm starting to get out of touch with the cool stuff if it ain't on slashdot.
I'm on call right now, actually. If I have a bad night, that requires me to be awake from 2am to 6am I will send an email saying I'll either be in for half day, working from home, or not at all. My boss will not ask any questions other than requesting a follow up email about the outage when I can.
If I work an over night at the data center that runs past 2am, we're given an automatic comp day. This is all "under the table". The bosses bosses boss has no real idea. Hell, even if he did he probably would have no problem with it. Having a boss who is willing at acknowledge the time you put in and grant you some liberty with that can really make up for the fact you don't get paid extra.
If the questioner is an independent contractor, it's up to him to negotiate compensation with his employer. And that includes how to handle time spent on-call. There is nobody to police whether or not businesses treat their independent contractors fairly, whatever your concept of "fair" may be. In fact, one of the items on the IRS's 20 factor test to determine if a worker is an employee or a contractor is that a contractor should be able to lose money on the deal, whereas an employee cannot.
Of course, that is a convenient segue into whether or not this guy is actually an independent contractor. I've seen these arrangements before, and it is exceedingly rare to find one that would actually pass muster with the IRS. Typically, the "contractor" works full time for the company, can't set his own hours, doesn't use his own equipment, can't decide how the work is performed, can't hire subs, and doesn't offer his services to the general public. Companies who convert this type of employee to independent contractor status are opening themselves up to exposure that the IRS might reclassify (read: correctly classify) this contractor as an employee and demand back payroll taxes. The contractor could then take the employer to court, with that IRS ruling in hand, and argue that he is entitled to full benefits and to compensation for the time he was wrongfully denied benefits.
So now that the contractor is really an employee, we can talk about the subject at hand. I think anyone would agree that the effort expended for an hour worked is greater than the effort expended for an hour on call, and that the effort expended for an hour on-call is greater than the effort expended for an hour of leisure time. Therefore, it seems fair to me that time spent on-call should be compensated, but at a lower level than time spent on-duty.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
What that person really gets paid for is the relatively small, but crucial, amount of time he spends walking into a burning building with an ax.
This is flat out wrong. It isn't the small amount of time doing the job a fire fighter is paid for. It is BEING READY to do that job WHEN it is NEEDED.
Being on call when salaried is one thing. What happens when you call a plumber in the middle of the night? You pay more. No difference. If you are an independent contractor, you need to set your own rate. Being INDEPENDENT affords you the opportunity to structure that rate as you deem appropriate taking into account this ompetitive market. There is no law that says contractors can't charge different rates for different times of the day.
It's like that old joke about the engineer fixing the big machine by tapping it with a hammer*. Sometimes the CONTEXT of the work is just as important, and sometimes even more important than the actual work itself.
*There was an engineer who had an exceptional gift for fixing all things mechanical. After serving his company loyally for over 30 years, he happily retired. Several years later the company contacted him regarding a seemingly impossible problem they were having with one of their multimillion-dollar machines. It shook and vibrated violently every time they started the machine. They had tried everything and everyone else to get the machine to work but to no avail. In desperation, they called on the retired engineer who had solved so many of their problems in the past. The engineer reluctantly took the challenge. He spent a day studying the huge machine. At the end of the day, he marked a small "x" in chalk on a particular spot on the side component of the machine, took a sledge hammer and hit the spot a smashing blow. Instantly, the machine quit vibrating and ran smooth as silk.
The company received a bill for $50,000 from the engineer for his service.
They wrote him a letter saying that $50,000 for hitting the machine was outrageous as any fool could have done that. They demanded an explanation.
The engineer responded with a new bill stating:
One sledge hammer blow to machinery - $1.00
Knowing where to hit machinery - $49,999.00
"It's because they're stupid, that's why. That's why everybody does everything." -Homer Simpson
I run/ran a very small consulting company (3 employees including me). The rates are based on SLAs. We respond to calls during business hours, but are available with a 6 hour SLA for non-business hours. If a problem requires immediate response, we charge per incident. This cost keeps expectations in line. If we didn't charge then the customers would call for everything. We do factor in the on-call hours when we price the contracts and have a rotation. The subscription cost is not for the support, but for the right to get support.
I'd also suggest getting a netbook/3G card so you're not confined to your house when you're on call.
At my 9 to 5 it's a little different. We have a duty phone rotation so we're on call one week then off for two. We also have a support desk that fields the minor issues. SLAs for non-production and production systems are a must. Without SLAs people will call at 2AM for the stupidest reasons. Your pay should be in line with the expectations.
If you are the only support person for a business critical application then if it goes down you will get called so maybe it's time to either re-negotiate or train a secondary.
..."Should This Pussy Grow A Pair?"
I've worked On-Call shifts with a number of companies before.
Here's the deal:
The FLSA [Fair Labor Standards Act] regulations provide that "[a]n employee who is required to remain on call on the employer's premises or so close thereto that he cannot use the time effectively for his own purposes" is considered to be "working." 29 C.F.R. [section] 785.17
It is against the law for a on-call person to be paid salary. They are non-exempt employees by definition. Any time spent fulfilling required job duties outside of the office must be compensated. Overtime pay scales may or may not apply by job description.
Since a home system, paid for at least in part by an employer, including compensated phone/internet bills and job requirements to maintain a home computer for work purposes (or a provided corporate computer for use at home, including rotated on-call hardware shared by several people) is an extension of the office and the duties of the job, that home system is essentially ruled by the courts to BE the office when on-call. Anytime an employer requires an on-call person to remain in their home, or in proximity to a computer system and to carry and answer a phone routed by the company at specific hours, then that person, under the FLSA, is in fact WORKING. The rate they're paid for that time spent "waiting" for a call may be billed at varying rates, but generally not less than 50% of regular pay, and any time actually on a call would be bileld at the standard rate for that employee (or overtime rate if it applies). Many companies pay a base "convenience" wage to people who are on call but take no calls during that time.
The Supreme Court, in previous rulings, has also concurred. If you are bound to a location, unable to leave and persue personal activities (say, go to a movie, go out to dinner across town, play video games online, go shopping at something other than a local grocery store, etc), or are mandated to be at a computer to handle calls within X minutes of a notice of an alert (the "you can do whatever you want, but you only have 30 minutes to answer a page" idea), then you are essentially work bound, and not free to use your time at your own lesiure. For example, if while on-call, you could go spend a weekend at your parents, so long as you answer calls per company policy, and meet SLAs for handling issues, they you are only required to be paid while actually working, but if that company required you to stay "within 15 minutes of a connected computer at all times while on-call" then you are work bound, and must be compensated at at least a base acceptible rate during that time, including time-and-a-half as mandated for hours over 40.
For example, at one of my employers, all i was required to do was return a paged call within 30 minutes. once the call was returned, it took about 5 minutes to determine what the issue was, but we had a 4 hour response SLA, so you could tell a customer, "I'm on call, and not at home, I'll call you back in 2 hours..." and that was acceptible. We were only paid for time actually logged on calls (rounded to the nearest hour). At another job, The 1 week a month you were on call, you were expected to keep a quiet household, be at home at all times aside from quick errands, and if you got a call, it had to be answered immediately, and you had to be logged in within 20 minutes of the call. We were paid 50% time for all hours "on call" except meals and sleeping and 100% time on calls (and time and a half as it applied only to time on calls).
Further, in many states (including this one), even if only billable when actually on a call, it is illegal to be paid for less than 3 hours in any 24 hour period, regardless of the number of hours worked. It's also illegal to be compensated for less than 1 hour for any block of time spent working that is more than 1 hour apart from another billable hour. For example: on Sunday, you get a call at 10AM that lasts 30 minutes. You get another call at 3PM that lasts only 15 minutes. They have to pay yo
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
The conditions of the job are known before you take it. You either accept them or you don't. If you accept then you are being paid for being on call.
That old job as a university computer lab assistant manager: I had a personal 100% numeric beeper--this was from 1999 to 2001.
I actually didn't mind getting paid the flat rate no matter how many hours I worked. If I were paid per instance I showed up, I would have incentive to "create" problems.
Plus, I was an 18 y/o undergrad, getting paid for 30 hours per week. That was a nice gig at the time.
I've even joked with my current boss: if I were paid a 10-hour/wk bonus [that is, a 25% raise] to be on-call, I'd _happily_ be on-call.
Check out the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), in particular definitions of "Waiting to be engaged" versus "Engaged to wait". The former doesn't pay, the latter does. You can anonymously request a suspect employer / "client" of yours be reviewed, and the Feds will show up on their doorstep and ask to see all pay (W2 and Contractors) records for the last 2 years. Then they decide if a contractor who filed the anonymous request for such audit is actually an employee.
The mere dunning threat of such review along with credit reports is enough, in many cases, to get paid. If you have the patience for the dunning part.
More on FLSA:
http://www.google.com/search?q=Fair+Labor+Standards+Act
Cheers,
-dredeyedick
I'm not sure the fire station analogy applies. Lawyer-person implies that we're only working when we get a call. Nothing could be further from the truth. As most admins know, you put in a good 45 to 70 hour week just doing regular work, trying desperately to get things to hold together reliably so you can get some sleep. Soooooo..... that work doesn't count?
In one job, we got a pay differential for being on call. In my previous job you just had to suck it up. In my current job, we get additional paid time off for being on call, which makes more sense to me -- you're paid back for your time with additional time, which is often more important to me than additional money. Of course, this assumes you have enough people in the department to pick up the slack. It's pointless to grant time off and then not allow it to be taken.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
There's a U.S. Supreme Court precedent [hrhero.com] on "engaged to wait" vs. "waiting to be engaged". So which are you?
Absurdity: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion. -- Ambrose Bierce
"Many companies see the on-call issue as analogous to a fire fighter's job. Most of the time, a fire fighter is off-duty but on call, hanging around the firehouse, cooking, sleeping, or whatever. What that person really gets paid for is the relatively small, but crucial, amount of time he spends walking into a burning building with an ax." Maybe where that lawyer lives, firefighters spend most of their time in the firehouse cooking, sleeping, or whatever, and not getting paid for it. Most of the engine companies I work with spend 3-4 hours per 24 h shift drilling, and run EMS calls in addition to fire, pest (snake/spider/wild animal) relocation, and public assist calls, many of them averaging a total of 10-12 calls per shift (all calls included). They also get paid for the full 24, not a sub-set of it. There is no reason to say that someone who has an on-call status is off the clock just because they are not actively working every second of their on-call time. If you expect someone to be at your beck-and-call 24 hours, you must compensate them for that. Now, if they are at home, with an "oh-shit" pager/cell phone, you can probably compensate them for far less than their normal wage. As an example, I have a friend who works full time as a paramedic with us, and part-time as a blood recovery tech for a local hospital. Certain days he is on 24 hour on-call status as a recovery tech, and gets paid like $1.50/hour on call. If he gets called in to the OR for a job, then he gets his full hourly wage from the time the page goes out until he leaves the hospital again, after which the pay goes back to the lower wage. He can't drink alcohol, he can't leave the city, he can't really plan any long events, and though he does do things like attend his son's various sport events, he could be torn away from them without warning. The compensation, even at a quite low wage, is recognition that although you are not working, you are also not really free to do anything you wish since your employer or client could recall you without warning. I believe that any employer who thinks that on-call is just like being off-duty should probably come out here to a fire station of my choosing. That thinking will change toot-sweet.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. (Einstein)
I expect to be compensated for the alcohol I can't consume when on call
...this would be a non-issue. Money wouldn't exist, most things would be automated, and humans would be freed from boring, repetitive, stressful tasks like this. Unfortunately, most are stuck with their heads up their asses with the idea firmly ingrained that, "it's just the way it is." Well, it doesn't have to be this way and all who blindly support the monetary system need to realize that.
The fact of the matter is, your boss, no matter where you work or what you do, is going to try to fuck you one way or another all while smiling to your face. Corrupt behavior is inherent in our social structure. It's no surprise that people get laid off, that banks get bailed out, or that companies are allowed to pollute our planet at astonishing rates; when the primary goal is profit, all conflicting interests lose out. You can't expect people to behave decently to one another in this kind of system, because the system rewards corrupt behavior.
If you'd really like to learn more about the situation we're in, it's in your best interest to watch this movie: http://www.zeitgeistmovie.com/. Please make an effort to educate yourself, because we need all the help we can get.
Now, this is not absolute. If I have to carry the pager once a month and it rarely rings, then I don't really care. But, my general attitude is: When I leave work, I should be able to drink myself into oblivion while shooting heroin, in a plane over the Pacific. If I can't do that because of work, then you need to pay me for my time.
I'm sorry if you received the impression I said being salaried had to do with hours, I didn't say that and didn't intend for it to be interpreted that way.
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There's a pretty big flaw with the firefighter analogy - firefighters rarely get called in to put out blazes they started.
I've done my share of time on the on-call rotation, and while many times you get called in for things that you couldn't have prevented, often you get rung for things you should have seen and prevented. Or that your coworkers should have - but they experience the same with things you should have seen.
I'm not going to go so far as to say it's the majority of times, but everyone demanding that they need to be paid for on-call service should stop and give that little thought some consideration; does your employer mandate that you pay him/her for the time when you've brought systems offline? Because that might cost a fair bit more than him/her paying you for the time you lost due to things that were nobody's fault.
There's a happy medium somewhere, and I don't know exactly where it is... but stop and think for a while.
I work at a nuclear research lab. There are physicists here who are on call in case somebody in the reactor control room needs some physics calculations done (reactivity values during fuelling, for example). The position of 'duty physicist' rotates every three months, and the duty physicist carries a company supplied cell phone with them during that time. They also receive a small bonus (not sure how much it is) for being on call.
Agreed, but the issue appears to be a contractor who accepted a contract that stipulated they would be paid for 40 hours a week 'in the office' and would have to be on call when 'out of the office' and they feel they should be getting paid overtime. They simply appear to have made a mistake in their contract negotiations.
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Check out the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), in particular definitions of "Waiting to be engaged" versus "Engaged to wait". The former doesn't pay, the latter does. You can anonymously request a suspect employer / "client" of yours be reviewed, and the Feds will show up on their doorstep and ask to see all pay (W2 and Contractors) records for the last 2 years. Then they decide if a contractor who filed the anonymous request for such audit is actually an employee.
The mere dunning threat of such review along with credit reports is enough, in many cases, to get paid. If you have the patience for the dunning part.
More on FLSA:
http://www.google.com/search?q=Fair+Labor+Standards+Act
Cheers,
-dredeyedick
Why should I be disregarded because I'm the CTO of a small software company? I simply mentioned that in order to point out that I have a whole range of responsibilities outside of engineering and my day to day functions that require me to work or be prepared to work basically 365 days a year.
I wasn't always a CTO, I was a software architect before, a senior software engineer before, a software engineer before, and my very first job as as support for a virtual reality product (this was the entrypoint for engineers into the company.) When a company I worked at was purchased by a very large multi-national corporation I also found myself in a 3rd tier support role where I was on call 24/7/365 for a year (part of the transition.)
Why do you say they apparnetly want to add a new obligation 'for free'? It simply sounds like the contractor agreed to a contract and didn't realize his/her commitments or else is unhappy about that decision now.
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Salaried doesn't mean indentured servitude, though. Yes, I agree, if it was part of your initial employment that you will be on call for 24x7 support, you'd better figure that into your salary and just shut your piehole. However, many of us either a) used to be compensated separately for on call time or b) used to not have a 24x7 system, and were charged with one while maintaining the same position in the company. I'm actually at the unique intersection of both of these. I used to not have any 24x7s when I took this job, and once I agreed to take one on, there was compensation for disrupting my life for the weeks I got stuck with the pager (1 hour comp for every 8 hours on call, plus 1 for 1 recall time)
About two months ago, we all just got totally boned by a policy shift. Now they expect me to do it for nothing, and where I work, that means I'm no more than 15 minutes from being able to log in and I'm dead stone sober (meaning, a BAC of as close to 0.00% as you can get...). The only upside is that I get a minimum of 4 hours comp for every call. It certainly hasn't encouraged me to fix any bugs, since I enjoy the extra vacation and they're usually quite easy to deal with.
Ever seen the Dilbert where the boss offers an incentive payment for every bug fixed? Wally wanders off saying something about writing himself a new minivan. That's basically what they've created around here, and pissed us all off in the process. It's certainly not an incentive to make the pager quiet, just to make the bugs require minimal attention.
I don't think it's ridiculous, it's simply a matter of degree, and let's not forget this is a contractor who signed a contract. I'm just trying to point out that you can't sign a contract that stipulates that you do not get paid for out of office work and then complain that you don't get paid for out of office work...
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Small companies I've worked at have used a number of strategies to make this fair. One way to do it is limit service hours. For a while we limited service hours to 7 am to 7 pm, and if customers called outside that the expectation was that they'd get a call at 7 am the next day. I have also seen best-effort systems where there is no formal SLA, and several people get paged at once if there's trouble, which works in some cases.
The problem with being on call is that, if you have a life, you have commitments and do stuff that you can't just unwind in 10 minutes. Golf, fishing trip, reffing a kid's softball game, community orchestra rehearsal, picking up kids on the other side of town.
No one can take advantage of you without your permission. If you provide free on-call services, that's because you allow it.
I want to be paid extra for having to carry a crackberry. Evil geniuses turned a portable, always-on office/leash into a status symbol that actually makes people want them. I am in awe of this bit of corporate cat-belling.
Ask Fortune magazine about your rights as an employee/contractor? Why don't you ask Fritz the Cat about your rights as a mouse? http://www.saskndp.com/history/mouseland.php3
Fortune magazine makes no secret about representing the interests of businesses and employers. Their answer to you is going to be, "Be glad you have a job, do what your boss says, you miserable groveling wretch."
(Journalism education) I've always said that you can tell whether a journalist is any good by seeing who they interview. Do they interview people from all sides of the issue, or do they just get the people they agree with and tailor the quotes to support the argument they want to make? Anne Fisher http://money.cnn.com/2009/11/25/news/economy/overtime.oncall.fortune/index.htm interviewed two lawyers, one from Aiken Gump and the other from Fowler White Boggs. They're both employer's lawyers whose practice includes fighting unions and union organizing. They're not representing your interests (the employer/contractor), they're representing the interests of the employer. It's in their interest to encourage *all* workers to settle for a bad deal, so that if one or two of you try to demand what you deserve, they can replace you with someone more subservient and cheaper. Here's a Google search for those 2 firms:
Aiken Gump
http://www.akingump.com/services/ServiceDetail.aspx?service=267
Labor-Management Relations
The firm regularly provides advice and assistance to employers in union organizing campaigns and elections, including representation before the NLRB in unit determination hearings; negotiation and administration of collective bargaining agreements; arbitration and litigation of disputes under existing contracts; counseling and litigation in connection with strikes and related issues, such as striker replacement and strike-related violence; and the defense of unfair labor practice charges before the National Labor Relations Board. For those clients needing such assistance, we provide intensive training programs for supervisors on their obligations in union organizing campaigns or similar critical aspects of dealing with employees.
Fowler White Boggs
http://www.fowlerwhite.com/what-129.html
Labor Law/Unions
For decades our lawyers have successfully worked with employers to remain union-free. Our experience includes winning union elections and unfair labor practices cases before the National Labor Relations Board and similar local agencies. In fact, one of our senior lawyers began his career as a litigator for the NLRB. We have also successfully litigated union organizing, picketing, boycotting and violence injunction cases to aggressively defend the rights of employers, employees, and the public. We have negotiated favorable union contracts and arbitrated union grievances under union collective bargaining agreements. Our lawyers frequently advise and work with employers and their managers regarding compliance programs under various labor laws. Our lawyers have been recognized as contributing editors to the leading treatise on traditional labor law, “The Developing Labor Law.”
We have represented multiple national and local clients in labor law issues including:
* Wal-Mart
(/end quote)
Wall-Mart! They're a good candidate for the worst employer in America. Do you want to work at Wall-Mart wages?
If Fisher had instead spoken to lawyers from a kick-ass law firm that represents the rights and interests of employers/contractors http://www.vladeck.com/ she would have gotten a completely different story. (Even the corporate executives go to Vladek when they get screwed.)
IANAL but I've wor
If you are a contractor, structure your agreement such that maintenance and support requests outside of the SPECIFICALLY DEFINED scope of work are charged on a per incident cost.
There is a long history (and associated case law) for per-incident support billing. Get behind that.
If you are an employee, get your employment expectations in writing. Do this before you are required to meet those expectations, and ideally in the context of discussing your compensation.
Chasing an employer for unexpected overtime fees sucks for everybody and gives you a bad reputation. Be proactive about compensation.
Contract work usually gets one out of on-call. I'm a resource at an hourly rate. Just the fact that they would have to pay me as soon as the pager beeps is enough for me not to wear a pager the last 9 years. Not to mention it's customer to pay an On-Call fee/rate.
Be that as it may, OT is generally not available for computer workers. Most of us are compensated enough where OT laws no longer apply.
I'm the CTO of a small software company. My board can, and often does, call me at all hours of the day and night. I find myself spending quite a few Sundays or Saturday nights flying out early to meet with the board prior to important 3rd party meetings, I don't get paid extra for this, but I certainly considered this possibility before accepting the position and I made sure that my compensation package reflected these 'hardships.'
Is your income/lifestyle comparable to the average IT guy? Just curious. Back in my 'office drone' days one I got into a shouty match with one of my coworkers. One of the higher-ups had a private chat with me and I explained that the other person started yelling and that I wasn't going to tolerate that crap. So the higher-up told me this story about how he worked at a big company you've heard of and how their semi-famous CEO would stand an inch or two from your face and yell at you at full volume. This guy was blissfully unaware that the tolerance for that sort of abuse was proportional to the amount you paid for your car.
I don't mean to cause any offense, but the more you stand to gain from the success of a company, the less of a hardship coming in on a Sunday is. Maybe I've just got the wrong image in my head, but any 'Chief' in a company is unlikely to be living paycheck to paycheck.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, but a C level executive gets a whole other level of benefits.
I also kinda question the feasibility of a "a CTO" with the nick Assmasher, but that's another kettle of fish...
This is a complete no-brainer to me...
Yes. Of course, you should get paid for being 'on-call'.
Overpaid - in the original contract it stated that I was paid above normal rates to cover recalls. They had to understand that I can eat an drink and do what I want outside normal hours, but it they can contact me, then I'm theirs, free. Restricted - must respond with 30 minutes, must be contactable, must be sober, but paid at a small hourly rate for doing so, and then paid normal/overtime rates when I respond to a call. Recall - go and live my life but respond to a recall if they can contact me, paid normal rates/overtime if I am recalled.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
You have a 40 hour a week job, you turn up and *work* 40 hours - more than likely, more than that but do you get paid overtime? Probably not, particularly in the IT industry.
You go home, you have a phone, you have to have a laptop and possibly a phone connection nearby (depends if your mobile is your modem), you are expected to lug the phone/laptop everywhere, just in case.
You can't go to the cinema (that means you have to turn off the mobile), you can't go to the pub with your mates and have a good time (can't get drunk), you probably won't get a full nights sleep when the phone calls arrive. You WORK when the calls do arrive, for however long it takes to get the job done and you are expected to turn up at work, ON TIME, next day, to resume your 40+ hour working week, and you are expected to NOT get paid?
What sort of morons are these that say you should not get paid.
We work to live - we don't live to work. That, my friend, is slavery.
...Lyall
Agreed.
"Ever seen the Dilbert where the boss offers an incentive payment for every bug fixed" - One of my favorites followed by the one where Dilbert meets a new guy and asks "Are you a contractor or just mildly retarded?"
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Well, I hate to disabuse any fantasies out there but I'm the CTO of a *small* software company ;). I get paid well, but not in any way comparable to a board level position at a large (or even mid sized) company. I get to spend time in the board room. I get to be the software architect. I get to be the principal engineer. Apparently this job is about lots of 'opportunity' - LOL.
I wasn't always the CTO of a company, and I have been in the 'on call' support position when a very large company bought a smaller company I was the architect for. These responsibilities were added w/o any recompense. It was only for a transitional 1 year period though. I have been on call support at other times as well (especially early on in my career) and it was something I expected in moderate doses.
The issue the contractor in the article appears to have is that he/she negotiated a contract that stipulated they were paid for in office work but that they would not be paid for out of office work.
BTW, I certainly wouldn't put up with someone yelling at me at work, or a CEO doing it to me in public (my current CEO and I have heated discussions (we don't shout though) but we always manage to differentiate our work relationship from our personal relationship.) I doubt I'd put up with a CEO screaming at me in private either unless I felt I deserved it for some reason (i.e. login: root password: *** cd / rm -rf)
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It's simply a matter of degrees. I have many more responsibilities and time commitments than the contractor appears to have, and yes I very likely am compensated far more than he/she is. It doesn't change the fact that I planned for this in my contract negotiations, and the contractor did not.
BTW, 'Assmasher' is from a very very old issue of Dragon magazine where there was a runty dwarf with a giant warhammer who was named 'Assmasher.' It has stuck with me since then (I found that hilariously funny as an 8 year old for some reason.) It has been a handle from BBS through now. Out of context it is a bit 'unfortunate' as a nick ;).
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Presuming he/she is salaried, you can't complain about it after accepting the position. You can attempt to re-negotiate your employment contract or quit.
This attitude always confused me - just because I'm salaried doesn't mean my employer gets carte blanche with my life. Sure, the law says I don't get paid for overtime. On the other hand, it doesn't say I must work an unlimited number of hours, either. Employers just like to "expect" that. (And why wouldn't they? Free labor > paid labor.)
And point out that:
- The post indicates this is an independent webmaster.
- Their client expects 24-hour service.
This is a case of not setting proper expectations.
On the other hand, this is the dilemma of the sole proprieter. I have many friends that work on their own. Those that deliver mission-critical (real or perceived) services find that they are called out at all hours, and suffer because of it. This is their single greatest dis-satisfaction driver, both for them and for their clients.
The only solution I've seen work is for them to get help to share the load. I've done them favors in the past, covering overnights whehn their wives were delivering, for instance, or to give them a day or two off. But this is the road you choose when you go out 'on your own'.
Now, the ones who don't deliver 'mission-critical' services, they set expectations and get time off. Unless they suck, in which case they work forever 'cause they can't get it done any other way. Most of them came to work for me at some point. And left.
The upside for the 'on your own' type? If they are any good, they can make good money, at the expense of no life.
Not a roll of the dice. More like picking the card.
And I feel your pain. I was in 24/7/365 support for 4+ years, and the client was without humor or patience, no matter if the problem was their error or not. Finally they decided to take their IT department in-house. It was music to my ears to hear of the full-timers who whined they got no time off. Turns out I didn't suck after all.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Problem solved.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
My company pays on-call technical support employees 1/4 of their normal hourly pay 24/7 for the week (Monday 8am USA Pacific Time until the following Monday at the same time) except for the time they are working their normal shift, when they get their normal hourly wages. So if I'm on call and my normal office hours are 8-5, I'll get my normal wages from 8-noon, then 1/4 normal wages during my lunch break, since I'm not truly free but on call, then normal wages from noon to 5pm, then 1/4 from 5pm until 8am the next day, and 1/4 all weekend long. If anyone actually calls, I'm on the clock earning full wages (including overtime when applicable) for a minimum of 15 minutes per phone call. On-call hours do not count as hours worked for overtime purposes. Of course, we're in California and are hourly employees subject to overtime, but I don't think the law requires on-call pay. However, in return for my being no more than 15 minutes away from an Internet connection 24/7, I get quite a tasty paycheck.
I think it really depends on how essential the service is. If you're part of an essential service, you're damn right you should get paid for carrying a pager. Other jobs, well, I really don't know. I think you'd have to take it on a case-by-case basis.
In Canada, part-time paramedics who carry pagers make $2/hour unless they get a call (in which case they get a "call rate"). Personally I think this is pretty ridiculous considering you have to be within a certain distance of the station, and ready to go with only a moment's notice. I personally think that anyone who is "on-call" for an essential service should be paid better than this for being restricted in how far away from the station they can go.
This trend is even more disturbing when you realize that nearly 40% of all Canadian paramedics are part time, and that this number is growing. The government is using part time paramedics as a means to slash wages for the full time ones by way of reducing their working hours and shifts. Additionally, because they are an essential service, they are not allowed to walk off the job and strike. The only form of protest they can implement is by putting signs on their ambulances, and picketing in their off hours. which of course amounts to nothing getting done.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
"This attitude always confused me - just because I'm salaried doesn't mean my employer gets carte blanche with my life" - what attitude? The attitude that if you don't think your company's demands are reasonable you can quit?
Who says they get 'carte blanche' to manage your life? You make choices, live with your decisions or make changes. It's that simple.
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He's not a CTO.
"Assmasher"???
With all that crap about how GIMP is killed for company use because it's name is rude?
Assmasher???
My last job had a cellphone rotation system where everyone took turns taking home one of the two emergency cellphones and keeping it for two weeks. The period of rotation varied with the size of the staff, which grew (and occasionally shrank) over time. We'd get paid $50 per resolved issue. Those weeks would be challenging because we'd have to stay within arms reach of a computer, but most of the calls that came in were only ten minutes long. Clients didn't see the expense because they subscribed to a general 24x7 support package. Dumb calls were mitigated by stating that after-hours calls were valid for emergencies only. I'd still live a normal life, doing things like going to the store and going on dates and such, and any calls that came while I couldn't touch a computer, I'd tell the client that I'd call back in fifteen minutes. Okay, all that said... it sucked to have to drag the extra phone around for two weeks, but it was worth it to get that extra check at the end of the session. We'd pretty much be guaranteed at least a couple of after-hours calls each week. A typical two-week session would yield about $400. Now what does this mean for you? Take some time to think about what's going to make your life liveable when on-call. Do that with a mix of applying conditions to emergency calls, charging back per incident, and reminding your clients that you are a human with a life and may have to call back after you get out of the pooper. Clients are people and will understand that you are a person too and are deserving of a life of your own. Also, applying conditions (e.g., charge per incident) will deter excessive calls.
I'm the manager of a Network Operations Center and my guys work 24x7x365 rotating shifts. They are entitled to the following: Afternoon shift premium Evening shift premium $100 per week to carry the pager (two week cycles) -- In the event that you miss a page you forfeit your two weeks on call bonus ($200). This goes to the guy who had to take your call. I have a back-up on call who doesn't carry the pager who is available via personal cell / home phone to pick up slack if needed. On top of the bonus you also receive your hourly rate with a minimum guarantee of 1 hours pay. I try to be fair with on call duties. If you can't carry the pager it's your responsibility to find someone else on the team to help you out, or risk the chance of loosing your pay and if it's a repeat offended being written up. I find most of my guys don't have any issue carrying the pager because I cycle though 8 guys so your only on call two weeks every other month. If you treat your team well they will bend over backwards for you when you need them most. If you don't pay them, then don't cry when they aren't there to pick up the page and it you yourself who has to bend over backwards. It's common sense! Family, and free time is more important to me. So I pay my team. Of course should the on call need me I'm always available, but I'm a manager and that's my job. I do not get paid to be on call, however I do get to take time off in lieu (assuming it's okay for me to take the day off - work is slow, etc...) or choose to pay out my OT on my next pay.
I work for a major railroad. Like anywhere else, we need people to fill in for others on vacation or sick leave or whatever.
I work on call, for ~US$3500 per half a month. I can work every other day, or none at all, and still make the $3500 for just being on call. There are stipulations though; calling in sick or just being unavailable dings you a days worth of that pay, and so on...
I would never work "on-call" again, without being on a 'guarantee' system.
If they insist on using that firefighter analogy, then you should bring a large fire axe with you whenever they call you in. They insisted that you need to bring it in order to get paid, didn't they?
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
If you read TFA, you will see that while he was promised that the job would be exactly the same as before, he was voicing that the amount of on-call work he was expected to do was not pleasant. This sort of indicates to me that what was expected of him did not stay exactly the same. Here is the source of his frustration. By all accounts, it appears the promises made to him by management were not accurate, and, being naive and wanting continued employment, he agreed to it without getting it in writing. Last time something like that came up with me, I walked out and had a better job lined up within a month. I would recommend he do the same.
Support the EFF and Creative Commons. The war is coming, and they're supporting you...
Being on call all time is a nightmare. You can't even sleep (or do your own pleasure) without worrying someone might call any minute, even a wrong number or a bored friend who had nothing better to do. I made it a rule to be paid OT or else compensate from my 40 hours. Now as for individual webmaster, I guess there should be guaranteed uptime and maximum time to attend to call, and if it's not something of webmasters fault, then he should be paid ever higher than regular hour, for taking of his personal time
This question seems to be a FAQ and SlashDot. Here is an approximation of what I posted last time. It is/was the actual policy at a Fortune 500 technology company during a time when I was the PHB that had to pay for the 24x7 coverage on a particular server.
For your 40 hrs/week, you get your regular pay. For your time "on the pager", you get 25% of your regular hourly, until such time as it goes off. From the time the pager goes off, until you clear the trouble ticket, you get 100% plus any applicable shift/holiday/overtime premium.
If you can dial in remotely and fix the problem, great for everyone. If not, you must be able to get from wherever you are to the server room in 30 minutes. 100% of the time you are on the pager, you must be in condition to work, ie: sober.
So... does that sound like getting paid 25% for doing nothing? Not to me. You can't get more than a 30 minute drive from the plant -- so no ski trips for you that weekend. Going to a party? Better have cranberry juice. You are getting paid for making yourself available.
My company had a policy that the cost of 24x7 coverage came out of the budget of the PHB demanding it. A very good policy, IMHO. Its too easy to ask for it otherwise, without considering the consequences, both in terms of dollar cost, and in terms of quality of life for the employees that provide the coverage.
Why should I be disregarded because I'm the CTO of a small software company?
Because you're the CTO and that's different from being a developer. C level positions tend to have more responsibility and also more pay
Why do you say they apparnetly want to add a new obligation 'for free'? It simply sounds like the contractor agreed to a contract and didn't realize his/her commitments or else is unhappy about that decision now.
It actually sounds (from the other comments with unverified sources) like the employer converted an employee to contractor without a written contract and continued to treat them like an employee. I'm sure you know how that would be a very bad thing.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
"Most of the time, a fire fighter is off-duty but on call, hanging around the firehouse, cooking, sleeping, or whatever" Bunk. When I was with the fire service when at the fire hall we were not 'on call'. The guys who were at home with a pager - and who only came in if the resources on duty were stressed, were on call and they were paid a percentage of their wage for those hours and had some restrictions placed on their time (i.e, they were not allowed to drink or to travel outside the city). Our service had two 12 hour shifts, one for day, one for night. The 'on call' shift was the day shift at night; and the night shift at day. There were four shifts in total. So, work a week - a duty shift and an on call shift, then get a week off. Welcome to the world of the white collar proletariat. On call without compensation 24/7 - get *&^&*Y*(&^!
I'm on 24/7 support, and this is how the renumeration is done when I'm rostered on. Firstly, there is an "on call" allowance that's paid regardless of any callouts or not. This is paid at two different rates according to whether a it's a weeknight or a weekend, and a full week of on call allowance amounts to around about a day of normal wage.
Secondly, if there is a callout, no matter how trivial, I get paid my normal hourly rate for a minimum of 1 hour. Any time spent greater than an hour gets rounded up to the next nearest hour.
This system seems to work pretty well, for me at least, but then again, the system I'm on call for is fairly stable, so it's not too much of an inconvenience.
Also, be sure to negotiate your on call/callout remuneration in connection with some sort of service level agreement. If they want to, say, have you respond to a request/issue within 30 minutes at any time of day or night, charge them accordingly. I suspect that the client will start to revise their service level expectations in line with what they can afford or want to pay.
Oh, and I'm also a contractor, so I can't see a good reason why contractors cannot have on call renumeration in much the same vein as permanents. Note that I'm based in Australia, though, so YMMV
"This attitude always confused me - just because I'm salaried doesn't mean my employer gets carte blanche with my life" - what attitude? The attitude that if you don't think your company's demands are reasonable you can quit?
Who says they get 'carte blanche' to manage your life? You make choices, live with your decisions or make changes. It's that simple.
Apologies - I meant the attitude of *employers*, not employees. My work once told me that "a reasonable amount of overtime" was expected as part of my salaried job. (This was after being hired, of course). I asked what was considered reasonable. The answer was "well, you and your one-up will have to discuss that".
Suffice to say, I don't consider any amount of working for free to be "reasonable". They still try and reach me after hours. Calls are returned when I get to them, based on (a) how urgent they are in my opinion, and (b) how much uglier they will be to solve on Monday vs. dealing with it on off time. When questioned on it, I simply say I was busy with my family and away from the phone.
That's great. I'm not saying that unions haven't done good things for the labor force in the US. They have. Muchas gracias.
HOWEVER, a great deal of the protections that organized labor used to provide are now provided BY LAW. This makes the labor unions somewhat superfluous.
Also, in many unions, cronyism is rampant. As has been mentioned elsewhere. You fall afoul of the crony brigade, with something as simple as someone not liking you, and you are FUCKED.
My grandfather was a nice, amiable guy. Good union man. Had a couple small black marks during a time he was struggling with alcohol. But the union stood by him. By the time the unions had major strikes, all his kids were out of the house and the house was paid off, so he didn't really lose anything when the union went on strike. So he voted to strike.
My father, also a nice, amiable guy. A good union man. No black marks on his record, ever. Had nothing BUT problems because during two strike votes, he voted not to strike. Why? He had three young kids and a wife who was currently out of work and monthly house payments. He couldn't AFFORD the strikes. Well, one of the guys (single and childless) who later became a union supervisor didn't take kindly to that. Every time this guy was put in charge of an area my father worked in, less than a month later my father was laid off, being told there was no work. Never mind that there is enough work in our metro area, PAID FOR AND PENDING, to keep literally every man in the local hall employed for several years.
The last time, he was replaced a week later buy the guy's nephew who was brand new to the union. And the union heads wouldn't do a damn thing about it. This essentially forced him into retirement five years early. Yet again, he and my mother just BARELY managed to squeak by financially.
Oh, did I mention both my father and my grandfather belong to the same union?
You think I'm going to pay "dues" to a group of self-appointed middlemen who sit back and do nothing positive for me while they smile at me and screw me over because one of them just "doesn't like" me? Regardless of my skill? Regardless of a spotless work record and work ethic?
FUCK THAT NOISE!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I was union. at that time, we were a pool of on call individuals and we were paid handsomely IF we took the call. There was a list based on who had the most overtime. That system worked well. the people who wanted the overtime got it. I am now exempt. there is a pool of 25 of us. We each take a week in turn being on call carrying a call out cell phone and pager with no extra pay but at least you know not to plan an out of town trip for that week. The payoff? I get six figures for my 40 hour work week + 1 week of on call a year. I am very happy with that and I knew that going in. If you don't know that going in, that is a problem... yours if you want to keep your job.
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
You mean they still have Pagers in the USA wow you will be teling me next that att&t has TO's doing bank cleaning next :-)
That's exactly what I would recommend if he's in the position to do so. He is unhappy with his decisions, he needs to either renegotiate or move on.
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It is illegal to, without the permission of the employee, convert a full time worker to a contract worker (for several reasons.)
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Well, if you and I are going to wait until employer's attitudes become 'reasonable', we should start auditioning for 'Waiting for Godot' ;). I would settle for employer's in technology companies not considering the production/management/deployment/support of software as the equivalent of making lipstick. Just something you can box, ship, manufacture without understanding...
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Worked as a software dev for a large banking firm in Canada. We were paid four hours a week just to hold the pager, and then time and a half for any calls we received, with 30 min automatically charged as soon as the pager rang. We couldn't travel out of the city when we had the pager, and had to limit drinking to meals.
I'm a writer, a poet, a genius, I know it. I don't buy software, I grow it.
Many companies see the on-call issue as analogous to a fire fighter's job. Most of the time, a fire fighter is off-duty but on call, hanging around the firehouse, cooking, sleeping, or whatever. What that person really gets paid for is the relatively small, but crucial, amount of time he spends walking into a burning building with an ax. A webmaster, likewise, has slow times and busy times.'"
Fire fighters may not be paid over time, but they are given their own fire hall to use. In that they usually have a lot of entertainment like tv's with cable and DVD's to watch. Usually there is a ping pong table or maybe even a pool table or other gaming platforms. They get beds to sleep in and a whole kitchen to use to cook what ever they want. Now you want your IT guy to be on call 24/7, what exactly have you given him to be happy? What perks do they enjoy for their services? How many techs are thinking about the vending machine and microwave they have been living on that are wondering if they should have been fire fighters instead?
Man.. I would love to see the listing in the lobby of your software company:
CEO: John Jones - Rm. 104
CFO: Mabel Smith - Rm. 108a
CTO: Assmasher - Sub-basement, right next to the Gimp's office
I'd carry the cell or pager for free - hell, I've had one bolted on for so long they'll need to do surgery to remove it when I die - that's IT. But if it rings and I'm hourly? I'm charging you somehow...
If it's something small - I might hang on to it until I do something bigger, then just make the bigger thing cost a bit more - so I look like the good guy - not always charging you :-)
If it's something larger, you're getting a bill, the next day.
Train the customer for how you want to bill. If they don't pay, then stop answering the pager when shit hits the fan. Come in the next day and fix it.
While they're screaming about it, ask about the outstanding invoices. Take the money. Blame the problem on faulty cell or pager coverage. Feign ignorance. You'll get paid from then on.
If you don't - then fuck em. Find a new customer.
I am in an on call rota. For that I get an additional 9.5% added to my salary. During my weeks, I carry a bleep 24/7. If I get called and can solve it over the phone in under 15 minutes all done. If it takes longer or I cannot solve it remotely I go in and am paid time + 1/3, time and 1/2 for unsociable hours or double time for public holidays.
Working in the public sector is not as highly paid as private industry but I am one of those strange people who feels that job satisfaction is worth a little money.
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
You necesarily need a union. Some states have laws directly related to this.
Although some large companies think they are above the law.
“Engaged to Wait” or “Waiting to be Engaged”
In Skidmore v. Swift & Co. (1944), the United States Supreme Court classified an employee as
either “engaged to wait” or “waiting to be engaged”. An employee who is required to stay very
close to the workplace in time and distance, and has very little freedom to use the time as their
own is “engaged to wait” and the time is classified as work time for compensation purposes. If
the employee has only minimal restrictions on the use of their time while on call, and has a fair
amount of time to respond to the call, they are “waiting to be engaged” and the on call time is not
hours worked for compensation purposes.
There is no one universally accepted test for determining whether on call time should be
considered as hours worked. The following factors may be considered in making the
determination whether on call time is compensable. All of these factors should be considered
in conjunction with other relevant information in making the decision.
1. THE GEOGRAPHIC OR RESPONSE TIME LIMITATIONS PLACED ON THE
EMPLOYEE. A narrow geographic restriction, or strict time limitations, may be
indicative of an employee engaged to wait. For example, requiring an employee to
remain close to the workplace, or requiring the employee to respond in 5 minutes, are
indications that the employee may have been engaged to wait.
2. THE FREQUENCY WITH WHICH THE EMPLOYEE MUST RESPOND TO CALLS
WHILE ON CALL. If an employee is required to respond to a call every time he or she is
on duty, then the on call duty is more disruptive to nonworking time and is more
indicative of an employee engaged to wait.
3. THE USE OF A PAGER OR CELL PHONE. The widespread availability of cell phones
and pagers has made it less likely that on call time will be considered working time, as
COLORADO DEPARTMENT OF LABOR AND EMPLOYMENT
DIVISION OF LABOR
633 17th Street, Suite 200
Denver, Colorado 80202-3660
Toll-free: 1.888.390.7936 Fax: 303.318.8400
Website: http://www.coworkforce.com/lab
Keyword Index
the employee is not required to wait near a home phone or other specific location. Merely
requiring an employee to carry a cell phone or wear a pager does not in itself make the
time compensable.
4. THE CONSEQUENCES OF FAILING TO RESPOND. Greater flexibility in response to
a call increases the likelihood that the on call time is not compensable. For example, if an
employee does not have to respond to a call, or only has to respond to a certain
percentage of calls, then the time spent on call is less likely to be compensable.
REFERENCES
Colorado Minimum Wage Order Number 22 (Section 2)
29 Code of Federal Regulations 785.14 - 785.17
Skidmore v. Swift & Co., 323 U.S. 134 (1944)
WEBSITE LINKS
http://www.coworkforce.com/ (Colorado Department of Labor and Employment)
You are paid for doing your job. If your job as an engineer on a project including a website says you must be on call part of the time, then you must be on call part of the time. If you don't think the pay per unit of work is acceptable, work it out with your boss or leave for another job. It's simple. If you just want less work and the same pay, then that's just now how the world works.
moreover, it is illegal to treat an IC like a regular employee and you can get all sorts of lovely fines from the IRS if you do so.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Yes you should be paid. Or otherwise compensated.
Get up!
First of all, there is no such thing as a "permanent" job anymore. If you think a salary gives you some kind of security, you're nuts. When the pager goes off or the phone rings, the meter is running. Minimum 15 minutes, 15 minute increments. And for God's sake have someone doing 1st level support. "That's not a database error, it's a network problem. Call this number..."
As a consultant, I was paid quite a lot for being available for an on-call basis; several thousand a month.
I also didn't have to do much when things happened. I would join a call, establish that it was not my problem, and then drop off.
If you're deeply concerned for your jobs, get better at your jobs and leave your bad gigs. Retention and performance problems should correct this problem of thinking that management assholes can get people to work for free. They would never work for without compensation. Why should people who are smarter than them?
I run a software company. In the past, we'd have called employees if we needed them at night, but VERY rarely did that happen. We have a new(-ish) customer that requires far more frequent support (i.e. I've worked every day for the last eight months). This quickly became too much to ask of our employees. They were getting calls from SOMEONE three and four nights a week, or close. *I* was getting calls 24/7, and I'm not joking even a little bit. Granted, overtime work - when they got calls - was time and a half, but it's stressful to be on call. I started to feel like a dick, and so we figured out a way to fix it.
Anyway, we now require our new customer to pay us a per diem for each day for support. We then pass that per diem on to the employees. We pay them twice the per diem on the weekends. They still get time and a half if they do work.
Before, I was on support more often than not, because the employees simply didn't want to be. Once we instituted the per diem, the employees began clamoring for the chance to be on support. My nightly workload has been reduced greatly (yay for mere 14 hour days!)
Anyway, moral of the story:
- Absolutely, any boss should agree that it's desirable to pay support personnel for on-call time. For any bosses that disagree: you're a dick, and you apparently aren't aware. Go ask someone "am I a dick?" Preferably not an employee. If one asked you to read this, PLEASE not that guy.
- Alright, so we agree that support personnel should ideally be paid. That doesn't change the fact that *sometimes* struggling companies have a really, really, really hard time doing so without the company going under (the tough part about being the boss is COMPLETELY IGNORED BY EVERYONE, btw). Don't demonize companies is this position, but if your boss is reasonable and in this position, approach him about it. Ask him to read this post, or try to meaningfully convey the stress involved in being on call to him and that you feel it deserves compensation (it does).
- The easiest way for your boss to pull this off, in my experience, is to pass it through entirely to the customer(s). This portion of the company's income should be ~profit neutral. Do not expect a similar margin to normal work, bosses: you get paid on the overtime, and your employees stay around because you treat them awesomely, right?
Now the last part, from the boss's side:
- You will pay this per diem every day for support. You will fight tooth and nail to negotiate it for them.
- Your employees will gladly take it.
- One day, after you've paid an employee a SHIT TON of money, he'll get an early morning support call and act like a complete dick to you. This sucks.
- When it happens, it hardens your heart a little bit towards fighting tooth and nail for the next thing.
You know that sucks, right? When you're a dick to your boss after he's foregone multiple paychecks historically to make payroll. Right? When he's still crawling his ass out of debt from building the company that pays you a per diem?
Rambling...but the truth must be told! :)
-knewter
First off ... he is an independent contractor. If he doesn't like being on call for his clients, he needs to negotiate his rates accordingly.
.. fix it and learn how to build sites that don't crash. If it's because you are installing on the weekends, I guess that means you don't have to work on Monday, do you.
If he can't change his rates because someone else is willing to do it, then tough. That's what the world of contracting is all about. Sorry your company laid you off and then re-hired you this way. Get off your ass and get another job, and deal with it until you can. If you can't get another job, maybe you just aren't that good. Deal with that also, it means you have to take the shit jobs to earn a living.
And why is a webmaster being called at all hours of the day and night?? Is it because the site keeps going down?? Then it's your own fucking fault
Get some cajones and learn to stand up and take responsibility for your own life. You let people take advantage of you, this happens.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
We run a small IT services firm. Small enough that "management" does a fair portion of the work. What we came up with is that every employee can choose whether or not they want to be on-call (with absolutely no pressure to be in our out of the schedule). We then scheduled the people to be on call without pay. If a call happened to come in during off hours, we would charge double our normal rates for the service, and the technician performing the labor would keep half. If you want to have the chance of making extra money, they you get participate. If your life is too busy to be on call: opt out. So far so good, but then we don't get a lot of calls during holidays.
I get the on call service once every 6 - 7 weeks or so and hold it for a week. We don't get paid anything for being oncall, but we do get OT for after hours and Saturdays. On Sundays and holidays we get DT. During the week the service may call once, but it's rarely more than twice.
And as an American in IT working at a unionized plant (I'm not in the union, but I write programs to do scheduling and such based on their ridiculously complicated seniority rules), let me give the other side of the story.
Yeah, this really happens several different ways. First and most obviously, they surpress the wages of the competent. There are people at our plant who are awesome workers who deserve more pay, and lazy people who should be fired and paid nothing at all. But firing is almost impossible, and the union insists everyone gets paid on the same scale. So the people who are as lazy as a pet coon make more than they are worth, and the competent people subsidize this by being paid less. Also, the minute workers unionize, management has to start playing heavy defense and trying as hard as they can to not give raises. Why? Because if they give raises and then have a bad year as a company (such as Chrysler and GM), the union won't take a pay cut, and they may go bankrupt. Every company who has watched the UAW over the years intuitively understands this, so they work hard at not giving an inch even in good times... thus depressing wages. My unionized plant is actually paid less than our non-unionized plants, so it really can happen that way.
Happens constantly. My father in law (a union member) quit his job as a union steward because he was sick of defending people who were in the wrong. At my plant it's the same way. Most grievances are filed by inept workers with a sense of entitlement. Likewise, most of the times management tries to fire inept workers, they can't, because the union defends them tooth and nail. We busted one guy repeatedly for spending hours looking at porn at work, and he kept getting defended. The only way we got him out was by essentially plea-bargaining him: you agree to resign, and we won't make public what you did, so your family won't find out. Otherwise, we couldn't have gotten rid of him, because the contract says you can only be fired if you commit the same offense twice in a six month period, and he was doing it outside the six month window (or at least that's how often we were catching him).
Happens all the time during bargaining, although to be fair both sides are petty. In my plant, both the union and the management hated a certain seniority rule, but neither wanted to negotiate or change it because "once it's gone we might not be able to get the rule back if we ever want it in the future." So you keep it (and fight over it) even though both sides agree it's stupid.
This has never been more true than under the current US administration. The unions are pushing for two new rules. The first is card check, which allows unions to organize based on a check of who is carrying cards, rather than having a formal vote in which both union and management make their case, and then the members vote. In fact, you don't even have to have a majority to unionize under this! And look at the "employee free choice act" rule change: it takes away the right to a secret ballot and makes people vote publicly for and against the union. That way everyone knows who didn't vote for the union, and coercion can take place. Both of these rules are strong arm tactics that do not benefit employees, and taking away a secret ballot or organizing without a vote or even a majority are all totally un-American.
Every union I know of takes dues from its members and spends them to fund the Democratic party. Big Labor is pretty much a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democratic party, and everyone knows it. My father in law sees his dues spent to elect Democrats every year, even though he votes Republican. But that's how unions operate... just like some companies (cough GE cough) try to get in bed with government and carve out monopolies and policies in their favor, Big Labor does the same. They are all about increasing their size, financial and power bases.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
minute.
What you'll see is a lot of people telling you what they 'USED TO DO' when they 'USED TO BE ON CALL'.
I.E. You're going to hear a bunch of unemployed slashdotters telling you about how you are being treated bad and how you need to tell the guy to fuck off and he's wrong.
There may just be a reason they are unemployed.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
My first on call job I had programming call centers for a major company. My basic job was manning the hotline during the weekday from 6am-3pm, doing tickets, and whatnot. The rest was being on call which was shared for a week between 5 people. Every week, there was one primary, and one alternate. The primary from the following week was the alternate for the next week, and so on. It came out that you were only on call 2 out of 5 weeks, and that was fine.
Until the politics came into play.
After about a year, one person "graduated" to a new position where he wouldn't have to be on call. Another person left the company, and was never really replaced. So now I was on call 2/3 weeks. In theory. The other two people were very lazy. One of them was some Orthodox religious person who seemed to have major holidays and festivals about twice a month where she could not be on call and she'd "trade weeks" with one of us, but never really did more than say she'd take "next week, for sure." The other was a kind of a nightclub-hopping single "ladies man" who dressed sharp and partied hard. Even when he was on call, he couldn't hear the pager or would take hours to reply.
My boss just rolled over, because she was afraid they'd pull some EOE stint, and she was sort of passing the time until she left on maternity leave. So I was unofficially "on call" 24x7 for about half a year. I got paged about 2-3 times a night, on average, with jobs that went from a 5-10 minute fix to some that lasted many hours. I got no extra pay, and when review time came around, I got a 3% raise. I was making about a third of the wages of someone else in my position, so she pulled the "well, you're not perfect enough for industry standard" card. My response was to quit.
For up to a year afterward, I still got a few calls a month from the former clients, vendors, and business partners. Most knew I didn't work there anymore, but, "Pleeeeeaaaaase, can you fix this? No one is answering the pages!" No.
In other jobs, I was compensated with unofficial "comp time," and sometimes a cash bonus as a kind of "thanks for covering our ass." Comp time works like, "You worked all night fixing that?" Pfft, don't come in tomorrow, or "I am adding an extra vacation day you can use in any way you see fit later."
I think this attorney is speaking out of his ass. When a firefighter is at the station, they are on duty. It doesn't matter if they are sleeping, cooking, or watching tv, they are on duty and being paid for every minute of their time. When they can go home and do whatever they want with whomever, then they are off. It's that simple.
I know that in Los Angeles where I live, firefighters can make huge portions of their wages in overtime because it's still cheaper than the department hiring additional employees.
I get $50 a day for being on call then time and a half if I actually get called.
My company has about 12 people in support positions, and we rotate. Everyone gets a week of on call duty about every 3 months. It sucks, because I feel like I can't do anything that week-- because who knows when the call will come when I have to drop everything and jump on the laptop, or worse, head to the colocation facility or client site if the problem can't be fixed remotely. On call duty was not a part of the job when I started, but as the company grew and switched to a managed services model we all had it thrust upon us.
We get comp time (not 1:1 in terms of hours) if we actually have to go on site during off-hours, but no other additional compensation for basically giving up a month of our personal lives per year. Several of the techs, myself included, think on call duty should be on a volunteer basis with a cash bonus paid for taking it, but that's never going to happen-- the company ain't gonna start paying for what it now gets for free.
I think it would be only fair that an IT person get paid for being on call beyond their regular work hours. Especially if they are willing to make themselves available all 168 hours of the week. To me, that takes true commitment to the job and the spirit of real trooper. I can only imagine how taxing that might be on a person to get called any time during the day for a problem they may or may not be prepared for.
Last year I had picked up a similar job to help fund my way through college. While my on call hours were only the same as the business, since it was only regular business hours (9-5), it was still a bit hectic.
I thought it was fair I only got paid for the work I did, plus I got compensated for driving time. It would have been nice to receive pay for the 8 hours I was on call, considering there were a few occasions where I had to leave class early for a technical emergency, but all in all, I still attained some good experience and knowledge.
My blood hurts...
I have a very talented team of guys working for me. At this time, I pull a call rotation just like they do. Our employer pays us about 100 bucks a week when we're on call, to be available. It really mostly means just weekends, as we have 24x5 coverage. I've worked a lot of jobs where on-call wasn't paid, and, every time, being paged was mightily annoying. At least now it pays a bit. Being able to tell a prospective hire who I want to come work for me that on-call actually pays 100 bux a week, has helped me to land at least 2 of the last 4 people I've hired. It's not a big expense for the employer, and your talent that you want to hire will see you as better than the other potential employers if you pay for on-call. The market for Unix admins especially, is getting much better in the last 6 months (for job seekers). If you don't offer your potential hires some sort of differentiating factor, you risk losing them to those of us who understand that talent warrants respect, which is best shown to techies in the form of payment. Translation for managers: Trust your techie team leads; pay your techies for the extra work they do. If you respect them, they'll work harder for you. If you pull the "your job is to be here 9 to 5, on-call hours don't change that" crap, then I will be happy to hire them away from you as someone who DOES respect the techies.
First, some context. I work in a large dept. with ~500 IT (in the main IT group.. there are other small fringe IT groups as well) that writes Applications (COBOL / Java) for Mainframe and Midrange. Some of our systems are true 24/7, most are 23/7.
I work in 'environment operations', of which to clarify means that the actual "operations" for mainframe and midrange is supplied as a Service. So, I'm not a mainframe console operator, nor do I administrate midrange servers. I'm on the other side - support for Applications. Change management. Release management. Environment management. Production support. Performance management. Test support.
Several of our duties require for specialists to be onside or oncall outside of business hours. Where this is required, work provides a mobile phone (it pays for the phone and calls) and pays a 'restriction' which is a percentage paid per hour based on your current salary. For most people it means about $100 for an average week (7 days) of carrying the phone around. This is paid regardless if you answer the phone or not, and is directly based on the number of hours and time of day the phone is carried.
You don't get paid restriction, and can't be called, when you are Sick (or the night after being registered as On Personal Leave) or if you are on Rec Leave (holidays).
There are two types of payments associated with being oncall. The first is 'phone calls'. The second is 'onsite'. If I am called then I am paid at my rate, or at a bonus of my rate (1.5 or 2.0 x my hourly salary rate [Go Sundays!!! 2x hourly rate, yeah!]) depending on what time of day and what day the phone call is taken. The minimum time to be paid is 1 hour. If I am called any time during that hour, and the call lasts for less than 1 hour from the time the first call started.. it is still 1 hour. Any time over 1 hr is paid to the nearest 15 minutes.
The second payment type is 'onsite'. If they call me at 3am and it's a problem I can't solve over the phone then I have to come in. Normally, it's a mainframe related problem which requires direct mainframe access. So, they pay for the phone call at 3am, and they pay for me to walk into work at 3:30am. The minimum payment period is 3 hours. It is paid at normal rates for the first hour, and time and a half (1.5 x) for the 2nd and 3rd hours. Except on Sunday when it is always double time (2x hourly rate).
So, how it normally works out is that the oncall phone is called, on average, 3 times per weekend. That normally costs the business 3 hours of salary, plus the restriction for carrying the phone from End-of-Business each working day to Start-of-Business the next working day, and from Friday COB to Monday SOB. On average, we need to come in once per month. This costs the business 3 hours at time x 1.5 or doubletime. Sometimes, longer as some people can take 4 or 5 hours to solve.
Restriction is paid by drawing up a daily list of time spent carrying the phone (there is a template for this), and lists all phone calls received / sent (and time taken for each call), and all onsite visits. Every phone call and onsite specifies who called, what they called about, what the problem was, what was done to fix it, and what will be done (if possible) to prevent it from occurring in the future. This 'timesheet' for 'oncall restriction allowance' is signed by the Manager and sent to HR. HR verifies the claim and checks the claim against HR records - personal leave, public holidays, other claims, etc. The claim is put into the finance system and paid.
They reached a point here, a while back, when they declared that there shall be 'no restriction' and 'no oncall' and that this duty was 'part of the job'. That fell to pieces very quickly when most people undertaking oncall (several teams used to have to have oncall) put down the phones, and in some cases put in to have the oncall phones disconnected.
You know what happened next. That's right. Systems failed, and had to wait until the next Business Day to fix via Production Support. Problem
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When I was an Operations Network Engineer at a Fortune 500 company I was paid $100 a week to carry the pager if there were no pages during the week. For .5 - 7 hours it was $250, 7.5 - 13.5 it was $500, and 14+ was $750. If you got paged on a holiday it was $750 for that day, plus whatever for the week outside of that holiday.
I am no longer on call since I moved to the Network Design team, but I am occasionally contacted after hours for escalations. I still get to file the hours for those incidents.
The worst part was the rotation schedule for me. My team decided that they wanted 2 engineers on call at any time, so it halved the rotation date. Rather than every 10 weeks, it was every 5 weeks... and that was too much of a burden.
I wouldn't consider a new job with an on-call obligation unless it paid very well, or if I was really hard up.
I don't know about other people but I don't experience many times that are slow. I'm busy the entire 40+ hours a week I work plus I'm on call 24/7 even for things that aren't my job. Over the holiday weekend a proprietary server was having issues and although we pay tens of thousands of dollars a year for support they weren't available so somehow it was my job to try to get things working. The only reason I haven't pushed for on call pay is because they are nice enough to let me have a flexible schedule.
I think they should at least pay for a cellphone for me though if I'm going to be on call.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
While full time and salaried I was the only IT personnel on staff and was effectively on call 24 / 7. Fortunately the staff of ~65 only needed me on a rare occasion, which I took non-monetary compensation in the form of vacation hours equal to the time I spent fixing problems during non office hours. It worked for us in that situation.
At my current job I've somehow regressed to hourly full time and do on call in shifts. Here I record the time I spend working while on call after business hours and include it on my time sheet. I either let it be overtime (x1.5) or just leave early on Friday. This works for my current employer.
During a very short lived contract position my employer arranged service contracts with his clients and I got a share of the contracts for the clients I was "on call" for.I guess you could call it a retainer fee.
It's very situation dependent.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
In the early 90's just after the condo market bubble burst in the North East, I was working for one of those Massachusetts 'Miracle' Computer companies which sold hardware by the pound with significant margins on support. This company was second in the market to the segment leader Tandem. When you're selling gear that is supposed to keep working 365x24 you have support to match - round-the-clock level 1 who would get the box running again and then there was a cadre of level 2 primary and secondary on-call to deal with various specialties. It was written that the primary on-call received 5% of what they earned in a quarter additional per week on-call and secondary received 2.5%. Once you've done that math, that comes out to be 65% weekly additional for primary and 32% additional per-week secondary. For critical issues (as most were once level 1 passed them up) the primary *had* to respond to the page within15 minutes and communicate with and able to be on-line with the customers machine with in 30 minutes and continue working the issue until it was worked-around, fixed or passed off to the day shift. Cell phones were in bags the size of car batteries and only slightly lighter, your home *terminal* connected via 28,800bps modem (maybe a bit more if you shelled out thousand-plus for one with compression.) When customers called our support figured out what the problem was, even if it wasn't in the gear we sold. If you were secondary on-call you had 30 minutes to get to the customer, which if you were out meant asking for that meal to go or just paying and leaving.
Today they give you a cell phone, a lap top, DSL or cable modem to facilitate your spending far more time doing their shit and sort of expect you to be at their beck and call. Since then in start-ups out here, I can't say I know too many techies who worked 40 hour weeks. Those I've worked for provided comp.time for severe impositions due to after-hours incidents, usually immediate (as in next morning or day off.) When on-call loads and rotations became more formal it was trading an evening of on-call with a day off.
You can ask for whatever you want, however keep in mind with unemployment pushing double digits odds are there is someone out there whom is hungrier for the work.
$400 to pick up the phone
$800 if the conversation takes longer than 1/2 an hour
$1000 if I have to do anything (do work)
That clause in my contract has only been exercised once in 7 years of contracting, and that was by mistake...as soon as the caller identified himself I said "you realise this call just cost $400, I hope you have your managers approval"...he hung up, and didn't call back.
Make it hurt enough and you'll never be on call again :)
The firefighter analogy is pretty bad. An off-duty firefighter is able to leave or drink or otherwise be unavailable for duty. An on-duty firefighter must be ready to roll and not get more than a minute or so from his truck. There are few places in the US at least where one would be paid to be "on-call" while "off duty."
So, if the expectation is that the person's life should be structured around being available, meaning he cannot go to a movie or out with friends while "on-call", that's pretty much "on-duty." If being on call means that, in the unlikely event that something comes up, he's the guy that gets the voice-mail and has to respond in an hour or so, that's pretty much "off-duty."
I do this kind of work for a living, as a consultant who provides support for the work I've done.
In one case, a client of mine relies pretty heavily on my work and has for many years. She knows that if she calls with an urgent problem, I'll do everything I reasonably can to get back to her as quickly as possible -- day or night. In return, she knows not to raise the panic flag on little stuff during off hours. That's good enough in most cases.
We've talked about going to an SLA with, for example, a 4 hour response time on critical issues. My answer to that, is that when we move from "best reasonable effort" to a contracted response time -- even though I am nearly always inside that window already -- the cost goes from being covered by our regular work to several thousand dollars a month. Once it's a contracted promise like that, I have to keep backup people trained on the systems in case I'm on a long flight or get sick (or whatever) and I have to wear a pager, and get no time off without paying someone to cover for me.
There are ABSOLUTELY times when it makes sense to pay for that kind of coverage. I could even argue that this system is important enough that she should do it, but I also have to be clear that for 99% of the time -- and has always been the case for the last ehemteen years -- it will be money that doesn't buy any new results.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
I worked as a primary source for a 911 Fire/Ambulance call center for a city of 1.1 million. I would swap with one other person on a week by week basis. Firefighters and ambulance crews were all on call for their shifts, but went home (and were logged off the system). I was carrying a pager 24/7 and *Would* get paid for carrying it. When I got a call at 3:00 AM, I would bill for my time. Sometimes my supervisor disagreed with the billing, stating that the call was not urgent and could have waited till morning. I don't work there anymore. When the phone rings/pager beeps at 3:00 AM, your sleep is interrupted. People on the other end want service....right now. It was always at tough call: is this call important enough or not. Sometimes I would pass it off as unimportant and leave it for morning. Sometimes I would take care of the problem. What really pissed me off was handling this kind of call once, being told its not important (and not paid) and the following week passing on the call and then being told that I should have done something right away (but still not paid for the previous week). One time a major disaster happened (important server hard disk crash). I changed the network name of a training server, and installed it. There was no backup software (I wasn't there when the system was installed). I configured most of the software to work with the new server and after several hours things were about 95% back to normal. I had the hardware vendor come in and swap memory from the old server to the new replacement (proprietary unix hardware). I actually got paid for the work, but users were still whining about the last 5% (changes made in the last 6 months when the system was already 8 years old, and overdue to be replaced). I worked there for about 6 more months, but with so little joy, the compensation never fit effort, and when disaster struck, I was the man. When new systems came in, I was junior junior support person. Left out of loops/information/documentation and what I saw as left holding the bag for others bad decisions, I left (they weren't happy), but at least I'm paid for what I do now.
As the lawyer himself said: "Should he be compensated for the times when he is available but not busy?" In the case of a firefighter the answer is emphatically yes AND they only work a regular shift. Firefighters (at least where I'm from) work regular hours during which they can be dispatched. When they are not working, they are free (for example) to go to a birthday party and get drunk.
Having someone on call without compensation (whether that is overtime when the call comes in or a per diem) is ethically wrong and professionally stupid. When my employers want to be able to contact me in an emergency I offer them column A and column B: they can pay for an SLA or they can take pot luck. If an employer expects me to keep my phone on, stay in cell range, keep my laptop on hand, not drink or smoke etc. they can pay me for the inconvenience. That also means that we can make arrangements to cover gaps (for example if I'm going camping or getting married) with clear boundaries.
I take issue with the comparison between a Webmaster and a Firefighter. A firefighter gets paid for hanging around, mostly, then being put in harms way when there's a fire. A webmaster has a 40 hour full work week. If you hire a webmaster who's only job is to wait provide emergency on call help, then it would be a different story. If it's an occasional call, of course, then, I wouldn't make a big deal about it.
How much does a geek doing the same stuff as you earns?
Once you know that then you can asses if what you are given is fair or not.
At some point on my career I was earning double what others in the same field, I was on call (on a rota of 2 or 3 depending on circumstances, you would be stupid to accept 24x7x365) and received no compensation, but clearly the salary and the exact limited situations in which I could be called out seemed fair to me (I was simply not contactable when it was not my turn to be oncall: both pager and mobile was off, my answering machine at home on to ensure I could vet callers first before answering).
In other situations when the salary was not that good, I made absolutely certain that I got compensated in one way or another for being oncall. It could be money, time or both. The important thing is that it should be clear to both parties how compensation is handled.
If you are working without being compensated it is down to your own stupidity. Sorry, but there is no nice way to put it.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I've been getting worked like a dog in a Unix Systems Engineer/Support role at a large company in 1.5 years. We have only three guys in the rotation to support over a 1000 machines which means pager duty for 7 days every third week. One person in the group failed to get a security clearance, so me and the other 'cleared' guy got screwed into now carrying two pagers every other week with no mention of increase in pay. Not only would I have to be on-call every other week, but I'd also have to be within short driving distance the data center in the event that some kind of hardware failure occurred that couldn't be handled remotely.
The systems and the monitoring put in place was so bad that the pager would be alerting every few hours or often every 30 minutes. Blips in the network (due to a switch config change) would cause the pager to get 10 false alerts and wake up my girlfriend and I in the early hours of the morning. I have endless memories of waking up with the pager(s) stuck to my chest because the damn thing was alerting so often that I'd have to check the alert page to see if it was real or fake while still in a sleep state. It's been about a year and a half of this shit and I'm basically burnt out from operations. Sure I'm making good money, but I tell you, unless there is a good operations procedure in place and there is proper tiered support, you WILL NOT HAVE A LIFE. You won't be able to enjoy your life at all. Insane operations positions simply are just not worth it and will consume the majority of your life. [ Not to mention, the fucking Directors and VPs of the company aren't working like dogs... they are busy posting pictures of their kids to facebook and golfing... ].
It's complete crap that my employer stuck me with an extra week of 'implicit' and expected pager duty... and with no mention of pay or anything (They didn't even ask me if I was OKAY being on call EVERY OTHER FUCKING WEEK). The company simply just assumed that I was going to just 'eat' the additional week of on-call duty and that I would just happily fall in line like another dumb lemming and do it. I did actually do it for awhile like dumb lemming, but I've wised up.....
The funny thing is that I was offered a development position a few months ago within the same company and a 12% increase in pay and NO pager duty. I happily accepted and got rid of the pager... I will never EVER EVER EVER again work in operations and I will NEVER EVER EVER work in a job that requires me to carry a pager. I'll gladly go and rack up more student loan debt in order to get myself qualified enough to get a job that isn't on-call.
I'll stick to my 60k/year development job and work my standard 40 hours a week and get to enjoy my life a bit.
Killing yourself at work just isn't worth it - Respect yourself and your employer will respect you ( if they don't, quit and get another job ).
Unless your employer is well organized and they have a SANE operations department with tiered support organization... DO NOT AGREE TO GO ON-CALL.
I worked at a large company in a unix team (3 people) where it was required to carry a pager every third week. The pager was hooked to 15 monitoring systems and was basically a catch all bucket for any kind of alert. The pager would alert so often that you almost had to turn the damn thing off.
I remember waking up with the pager stuck to my chest because it kept going off every 15 minutes while I was sleep -- Apparently I would wake up just enough to check to see if the pager message was a critical alert...
I only lasted a year and a half in this job before i said SCREW IT and quit. I should have quit much sooner because I will never get that year and half of my life back. Also, this was a salary position where the pager duty time off hours was just apart of the salary -- yeah, total crap. I slaved for this company and didn't receive one pay increase.
Life is too short to work insane on-call positions.... Don't do it and decide to live your life...
One of the legal support companies I worked for in the late 90s was notorious for the "Can you do this on your way home?" kind of jobs that would involve me having to race to the courthouse at the last minute or do a stakeout when I should have been at home or at the bar.
The straw that broke the camel's back was being dispatched a filing at 5:30 pm that had to be in a dropbox at the US District Court across town by 6:00 that had been booked at 2:30 and had been sitting on a counter in the mail room at the law firm since 4 pm. When I came in the next day and informed them that I wasn't going to cover the dispatcher's ass anymore, I was told that my job was contingent upon doing whatever I was told. I responded that since I was on salary, expecting me to do drop dead work after hours for no compensation was off the table and that any lack of planning or competence on their part did not constitute an emergency or cause for charity on my part.
.
After about fifteen minutes of going back and forth and getting nowhere I handed them my pager and my paperwork and told them that if I was getting such a great deal, they would have no problem finding a qualified replacement on short notice.
In short, I should have negotiated a better deal when I was hired and gotten it in writing but I was offered what seemed like a good salary...for a 9 to 5 position. Pig in a poke, I guess.
Of course you should be paid for being on call. How much depends on what level of on call your employer wants, because shorter response times mean your freedom outside of working hours is curtailed.
If I were to be on call it would be nothing less than 10% of my hourly rate and then at least 200% in 30-minute blocks for a minimum of 1 hour including time spent travelling to and from if I am called in. If they complain it's too expensive then they should fix their shit so they don't need me on call or hire people to do my job when I'm not.
Contrary to popular belief, your employer doesn't own you, but then I don't live in the USA which seems really fucked up when it comes to, among other things, employment.
Under my contract, my employer has to pay me for on call but what they do is have me on call for just 1 hour. If I need to come in, I'm expected to stay till the problem is fixed. It's especially annoying over Christmas because I'm stuck in the local area and can't visit family yet get paid virtually nothing.
Oracle was successfully sued for designing their SE positions to exploit their salary designation. I'm not clear on what specific actions Oracle engaged in that led to them losing that fight, but I do know that a number of SEs received considerable compensation out of the suit. Oracle was also required to either change the designation for the position to hourly, or redesign it so it met a more reasonable hours/pr week standard.
Work a 7 day 24 hour a day shift each month. They are paid an hourly wage for eating, sleeping, pooping during that period. The rest of the time, they are off the clock. If they need more firefighters, they call them up and ask if they want to come work some overtime.
I am a union represented IT worker (DBA) for the same city government. If they need me after hours, they call. If I want the overtime, I take it. If I don't, I don't. If I'm not around, no big deal. If they wanted me to be on standby with a guaranteed response, they would have to pay me.
I loves me some union.
Now I have to admit up-front that I am presently working for a company with very generous on-call benefits, and appreciate them a great deal.
However, it's very simple for me: If I'm not getting paid to carry a pager, I'm not carrying a pager. I see that some people aren't even getting paid to do work after hours, which means that fixing other people's computers is apparently your hobby. Hope you're enjoying it. I'd rather play with my son.
If a company needs you, they need to pay you. If they need you to be available for emergencies, then they need to pay to tie you down. If they want your number but accept that you may or may not answer it, then you're probably not providing a pay-worthy service after hours.
When I carry the pager, I'm required to stay sober, available, and local. I can't go out of town, I can't go to an event where pagers have to be turned off, and similar things. This is something I'm willing to do part-time for compensation. I won't do it 24/7/365, and I won't do it for free. Anyone who does is selling themselves short.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
A lot of IT support positions require on-call duties. I've been there, done that myself. However, if one is expected to be responsive during off-hours then two things need to be considered. One is that there should be some compensation for being available at all hours. Not at full salary/pay levels, but some financial incentive for those willing to be inconvenienced at the worst possible moments. Second, when the phone rings, whether a site visit is required or not, the overtime pay clock should start and not end until the call is complete, including travel time to/from the site if necessary. After all, if your support is a 3rd party person/organization, then they would properly insist on a retainer fee up front to cover the on-call clock for the period of the contract, and work clock time gets billed separately. Why should an employee who is expected to put in a regular shift on-site be treated any differently?
Sometimes, real fast is almost as good as real-time.
What was in the employment agreement you signed? If you already signed an employment agreement that says they can demand you to be on-call for nothing then its your own stupid fault.
An employment contract should be an agreement between equals. Think of yourself as being a supplier of services to your company, not a subservient slave. In return for your time you get money. More time = more money. No successful business in the world does anything for free, so why should you?
If you are asked to do anything at all beyond your existing employment contract (i.e. in your own time), then you should first have the option to say yes or no witnout predjudice, and then be appropriately compensated for the extra effort ON YOUR TERMS not theirs.
A lot of tech companies are used to forcing employees into doing extra work in their own time at short notice and for no extra pay, and a lot of employees cave in. Those people are sending the message to companies that its OK to keep screwing us. Immediately the cavers stop being the companies bitch and grow some balls, the companies will treat us all with more repsect.
Leave any job with unpaid overtime.
Fail at unpaid overtime.
This is one of the reasons I left IT as a developer.
We were expected to work holidays and weekends while the rest of the business was not.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I do feel lucky that my current technical position is hourly. I work Monday - Friday 40 hours a week and I'm on call around one week a month. During the week I am on call I get paid an extra dollar an hour during the regular 40 hour week and on-call pay for any time spent working after hours. We get a minimum of two hours of on call time for every call we take (even if it takes 15 minutes). I am expected to be within 30 minutes of the office during my on call week as well. I get an average of 5 calls per an on call week. I tell people that when I hear the pager go off it makes an annoying beeping sound but when my wife hears it go off it sounds more like, "cha-ching, cha-ching, cha-ching."
My Xbox Live Gamer Card
When I am off work, I am allowed to do whatever I want. It's my time. I can, for instance, get drunk. I am over 21, so I am entirely allowed to go home, turn on old McGuyver episodes and guzzle down a bottle of cheep hooch.
People on call are not.
I can go camping, outside of cell phone range, in the lovely Mt. Hood National Forrest, where I can run around naked and be chased by bears.
People on call can not.
I can go to an all-night rave, where the music is so loud that there is no chance at all I will hear a cell phone or feel the vibrations going off. I can spend 10 hours straight listening to repetitive music and watching trust fund kids snort fake Extasy off each other.
People on call can not.
I can go to a spa, and spend two days getting mudbaths, massages and whatever the heck it is they do with avocados while my cell phone sits in the locker turned off per the spa rules.
People on call can not.
I can hop in a friend's car and go somewhere.
People on call must take their own car as they may have to drive into the office while their friends are under no such obligation.
So it all boils down to "when you are on call, you are still working. You may not leave your cell phone area, you may not get drunk with your friends, you may not go to a rave, you may not check into a spa for a couple days and you may not do anything else that would render you unable to respond to your cell phone in a completely work-ready manner." All that is missing is the ID badge and the cubicle.
It is a mostly low-level employee who is signing away all their recreation time, sacrificing for the company. They are working in the same manner that the security guard on the night shift is working: he can't leave, he can't drink, he may be allowed low-level recreation such as TV or something but otherwise is stuck there "just in case." And the rent-a-cop gets paid for it. So should IT.
Please review US federal labour law. It is NOT legal to turn an employee position into an "independent contractor" position. Being an independent contractor means that you work with your own equipment and facilities, at your own schedule, completing the task(s) as you deem appropriate, without substantive instruction from the contracting business. Anything else is a regular old employment relationship.
Unions are dumb, okay? There is no reason for it in the IT world, none what so ever.
Pay people for their time. If they are doing work 40 hours a week, then are on call, and a call comes in, pay them for that call even if it is overtime. Simple, easy, and sets a standard that doesn't suck.
Mike Horwath
There is NO justification for uncompensated -- i.e. free -- labor. Especially when one is working for a for-profit enterprise.
I support outlawing all non-rate-based employment, including salaried employment. All work should be paid on the basis of a rate: dollars/hour, dollars/project, or some other rate.
A flat 40 hours/week with no OT compensation and no cost to the employer to work the employee longer than that is fucking criminal... and only a communist -- one who believes in the free labor for the benefit of a larger collective (like a corporation?) -- would support it.
Yet, we have quite a few commies running businesses. Funny thing, that...
IT people have for far too long been working too many free hours. And for what? The opportunity to work more? Why? That's the most irrational thing we can do... ...except we do it, quite rationally, out of individual self-interest because we know that the pressure of competition means if we complain about it or leave, some other poor sucker will take our place (the squeaky wheel gets replaced) -- and our next job will simply be a repeat of the previous one, with similar responsibilities.
The only escape is a non-IT job.
Seriously, it's time we stood-up for *sane*, sensible labor regulations in America. You'd think a leftie like Obama would push this, but no...
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
'Many companies see the on-call issue as analogous to a fire fighter's job. Most of the time, a fire fighter is off-duty but on call, hanging around the firehouse, cooking, sleeping, or whatever.
And if no fires occur, do firefighters not get paid that day? I already know the answer to that.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
What the fuck are you going to do about it, asshole?
... we are paid one tenth of our salary while being on call doing nothing; and if the call do come, we're paid OT. I don't think that's robbing our bosses; that's only fair.