Take this on-call rotation and shove it
58 points by kylewlacy
58 points by kylewlacy
Sometimes pages decide to come during overnight hours. Here’s what happens when a page occurs in the middle of the night: First, if you happen to have a significant other, the alert sound invariably wakes them up before it wakes you. You get out of bed. It’s dark. It’s cold. You open your work laptop. Even at its lowest brightness setting, the 16-inch Liquid Retina XDR display lights up the room with its blinding intensity.
Reading about American employment practices is wild. Here in Sweden it is expressly illegal to disturb the hours of rest between midnight and 5AM. Exemptions can be made for roles that are critical to society itself but otherwise it’s not allowed. The only other way you can run a legal on-call rota here is by signing a union deal which will typically include a bunch of guarantees about things like paid parental leave and so on.
I had a similar reaction - it’s pretty standard to have on-call rotas for systems that are of dubious criticality in the UK, but in my experience engineers expect to be compensated. The idea that you’d do this for free is mind-blowing.
But I guess in a culture that seems to valorise overworking yourself (“oh anyone who really cares about their job should be pulling 80 hour weeks” etc.) perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising.
Software engineers in the US get paid much more than in the UK and are usually salaried and not hourly, so I don’t know what it means to say we’re doing it “for free.”
Software engineers in the UK are usually salaried and not hourly too.
But the understanding is that the salary is for your standard 40 hours per week, normal working hours. On-call is an extra responsibility, outside of normal hours, therefore doing it without extra pay is doing it “for free”.
Consider a job with an oncall responsibility, with two possible compensation structures. The first includes a base salary of $100K with an additional $20K for the oncall responsibility. The second includes a $200K base salary. Are people who elect into the second pay structure and thus making an additional $80K really working “for free” relative to those who elect into the first pay structure?
I’ll be the first to argue that my country (America) has lots of problems, including with labor regulations (or lack thereof), but I don’t see how this argument about pay structures could possibly hold.
Wrong question. The right question is: can the person being offered $200k with an on-call rotation make the same elsewhere without an on-call rotation?
The entire point of the hypothetical was to keep irrelevant variables equal, but yes, someone making $200K at a startup with oncall responsibilities could probably pivot into FinTech or some company for which their dad is on the board and make more money without the oncall responsibility. Maybe they traffic drugs or people. Lots of ways to make equal (or better) money without having an oncall responsibility, but the entire point of the exercise was to isolate the dependent variable.
But that’s not what you’re doing. You’re comparing two different salaries, in different countries, with different tax structures and different costs of living, for different roles.
I think you’ve misread the thread, I was very explicitly comparing two compensation structures for the same exact job. Allow me to quote myself:
Consider a job with an oncall responsibility, with two possible compensation structures. The first includes a base salary of $100K with an additional $20K for the oncall responsibility. The second includes a $200K base salary.
Yes, they’re doing the on-call for free. They’re making an extra $80k so it’s a better deal than Job 1 overall, but they should also be compensated for the on-call in addition to their base salary.
Those aren’t separate jobs, they’re separate pay structures for the same job. Both structures compensate the oncall work above the $100K base salary for the same job less the oncall work. The pay structure that you are arguing constitutes free work is valuing the oncall work at $100K.
Consider another example: I make $100K base salary and my manager asks me to take on an oncall responsibility. I use it to justify an additional $50K in base salary. Is my oncall work still free in any meaningful sense? Am I somehow more oppressed than someone else who is making $100K base and $20K for oncall?
I’m not trying to be facetious, but I’ve always understood “free” to mean “$0”, and I’ve never understood it to mean $100k. Either I’m mistaken about the definition of “free” or additional base salary for oncall work is not “oncall for free”.
Am I somehow more oppressed than someone else who is making $100K base and $20K for oncall?
Folks with an explicit oncall component are almost always better protected from management deciding they need to modify the oncall schedule to demand more more of your time. They’re also frequently better protected from oncall becoming more demanding (eg higher frequency of pages).
Folks with an explicit oncall component are almost always better protected from management deciding they need to modify the oncall schedule to demand more more of your time. They’re also frequently better protected from oncall becoming more demanding (eg higher frequency of pages).
I don’t think we necessarily disagree on wider points about labor regulations; however, this thread is discussing whether the oncall compensation component ceases to exist if it’s not formally broken out into a dedicated line item. So if you’re trying to express disagreement with my comment, you need to show how (for example) $100K or $50K (in additional compensation for the oncall responsibility) satisfy “free”.
Not trying to express disagreement with your comment - attempting to inject a little nuance into the discussion.
The downside of not having an explicit comp structure for on-call work isn’t that employees end up doing free labor, it’s that leaving it unspecified means there’s wiggle room for management to unilaterally change the arrangement.
I see your point. So, by “on-call for free” what I mean is that in the actual period in which you’re on-call, you don’t receive additional compensation compared to the period in which you’re not on-call. So unless you’re on-call all the time, an increase just in base salary that doesn’t also come with a bonus for periods of on-call is “on-call for free”. It might still be a better deal - negotiating a raise from $100k to $150k would be great - but the actual period in which you’re on-call is done “for free” in a sense.
I see this as a problem because on-call is an additional imposition on your life, a significant disruption outside of normal working hours that may even be as long as a week, so morally it should be compensated more than a normal week that doesn’t have that work-life balance disruption.
It’s a bit more difficult.
So, for example, if they increase your base salary to compensate for being on-call, but it’s not contractually bound to that… and they later don’t need the on-call, in some places they cannot lower your salary. (So actually, my recommendation for companies is to pay extra for on-call!)
There’s a lot of factors. Also, while being on-call has a human cost even if they don’t call you, how much they call you also makes a difference. I had a real bad on paper on-call thing in a job, but I also had veto powers on any deployment about the software I was on-call for. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a say on other systems that affected my system. On the whole, I got only a couple calls in years, so it worked out fine.
So unfortunately, I think it’s difficult for the worker to evaluate how much they should ask for on-call duties. For me the biggest factors are which % of the time you are on-call, how much control you have to reduce the number of calls, and how much flexibility do you have (can you alter shifts to match your partner’s days off?). Money is important, but it’s not so easy to evaluate. (Hopefully in some places and jobs this is well structured, documented, and public, though.)
In the end, I think most things boil down to how’s the organization working for. There’s orgs which are more reasonable, and there are orgs which are less reasonable. If you work for one of the latter ones, you are screwed anyway, but on-call can multiply how much they suck.
The other big factor is your personal situation. There’s people for whom some extra money for on-call is not a big deal. There’s people for whom it can be really disruptive and not worth the money.
Consider a job with an oncall responsibility, with two possible compensation structures. The first includes a base salary of $100K with an additional $20K for the oncall responsibility. The second includes a $200K base salary. Are people who elect into the second pay structure and thus making an additional $80K really working “for free” relative to those who elect into the first pay structure?
On-call expectations can of course be included in a work contract, but never just in general! On-call is always above and beyond normal working hours, and so always needs to be compensated pro-rata, above and beyond any kind of base salary or fixed comp plan.
Usually that means some number of dollars per hour on-call, no matter what; and then also some additional rate per hour during any active incident.
Do you know if salaries for tech workers that are not obligated to work uncompensated overtime is lower than for those that do? If not, then a worker is working for free, in that there’s an opportunity cost in not switching to another job with the same renumeration but more free time.
But I guess in a culture that seems to valorise overworking yourself (“oh anyone who really cares about their job should be pulling 80 hour weeks” etc.) perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising.
This is a stereotype. The overwhelming majority Americans don’t favor (much less calories) 80 hour weeks or any such thing. The legality of the practice has little to do with its popularity, but I’m pretty sure detailed discussion is verboten on this forum.
The idea that you’d do this for free is mind-blowing.
As others have mentioned, I doubt Americans are doing the work “for free” unless you have evidence that jobs with oncall responsibilities pay no more than equivalent jobs without them. I’m an SRE and I don’t have an oncall responsibility, and if management insisted on adding one we would be having a compensation conversation (or perhaps parting ways).
I’m a US dev with an on-call rotation: on a team of four, we each do one week primary and one week secondary. Secondary’s pretty light, but altogether it means I’m tethered to my phone for half the month. I don’t work more than 40 hours in a week, and nobody expects me to. When we need to trade shifts to cover vacation time or whatever, it’s never been a problem.
Honestly, I don’t mind. I’m supporting business-critical apps that my team built, so I have the domain knowledge to fix the operational issues that come up. Doing it this way incentivizes us to build reliable stuff. Every couple of weeks, we go through our logbook and make improvements to our code, config, monitoring, and alerting to reduce alert noise and overall errors.
I very very rarely get woken up, because our alerts are prioritized and all but the most crucial incidents can wait for business hours to fix. I’m compensated well enough, and this arrangement was explicitly part of my job offer.
Ive done on-call rotas for a big swedish company. It was usually the best, because you got extra compensation and a paid day off afterwards. If you were called in you got 3x the usual hourly rate. You were not allowed to do more than one week consecutively though.
Same here, but in France. All on-call rotation I worked on included whas is in that blog post:
Reading about US employment practices feels out-of-world sometimes :x
For what it’s worth, I think Europe is generally a better place than the US on account of its regulation, and I very much enjoy visiting France. That said, I think a common misunderstanding Europeans have about America is that practices that are not tightly regulated in America must be common. Regulation isn’t the only motivation for a company–they also want to be able to retain talent for a reasonable price, and if they burn out their engineers then those engineers are very likely to leave.
I’m not sure what is “normal” for software engineers in the US, but every company I’ve worked for stipulates 40 hour work weeks, but in practice few if any work more than 35 hours per week. 9-5 is generally considered to be normal business hours, but people can take an hour or more for lunch, leave early to pick up their kids, attend appointments, etc). No one really cares as long as you are getting your work done. I’ve also never worked anywhere that required oncall more than a week per quarter, and if people had to respond to alarms out of hours the issue was root caused and addressed so it wouldn’t happen in the future. In reality, oncall alarms have been rare (although I’m sure this varies a lot by industry). I also make nearly double what I could make in a large European city for my role, and that has been consistent throughout my career (I often consider moving abroad, so I’ve regularly kept tabs on this stuff over the last ~20 years) despite enjoying a lower cost of living (even accounting for healthcare expenses which are effectively capped, by law, to ~$8K/year) and lower taxes.
This isn’t to say life generally or labor regulations specifically is better in the US than in Europe–I’m only remarking narrowly about how life in the US often differs from the European imagination/media.
I’ve worked on call at smaller Swedish companies without a recognized union (the employer has not signed a collective agreement) but even there the custom was no night work (after 11PM) and monetary compensation or time in lieiu. The one place that didn’t burned out their engineers pretty quickly.
I’m curious, how much do engineers get paid in Sweden? Is stock compensation common?
Here’s some statistics from the engineer’s union:
https://www.sverigesingenjorer.se/lon/civilingenjor-lon/
Note this is across the entire society, “hot” areas like software development can get more compensation.
Stock compensation is seldom competive tax-wise.
Also, comparing pre-income-tax numbers across societies is deceptive. For example, my tuition at one of the 3 top technical universities here was “free”, but I took a government-subsidized loan to cover living expenses. That loan repayment was calculated as a percentage of my income and would have been lowered in case of unemployment or illness. On the other hand, “everyone” in Sweden paid for this university and others by way of taxation.
In general, working as an engineer here can lead to a comfortable lifestyle but probably not individual wealth, unless you start a company.
I’m not trying to be deceptive/ disingenuous, was just curious (not that you’re accusing me, it comes off just as a helpful disclaimer! I just want to clarify because maybe my question seemed leading).
I bring up stock compensation in particular because it creates an incentive - employees are invested in the company, which means there’s an implicit reward for company performance. How this actually plays out obviously varies a lot.
Personally, I don’t really mind on call, when I put effort into the company it pays off - I gain experience and value, I reduce financial risk, I’m typically rewarded in the form of raises, bonuses, etc. I’m typically compensated in large part by stock so I do feel an incentive to ensure that the company performs well.
I’m grateful to have only worked on teams that have empathy for on-call though and my current company is OOO-voluntary with compensation. It’s an imperfect system, I’m actually highly sympathetic to the idea that on-call work needs to be compensated with notably higher compensation when an actual incident/ page occurs (ie: 1.5x salary for the time of the incident). I’m less convinced (but essentially undecided) on whether some sort of “off hours” should be legally imposed but I’m sympathetic to it, I’d say I have like… a general leaning towards that idea making sense more than not.
The numbers were interesting to see, thanks. Always hard to draw much of a conclusion, especially when comparing relatively small countries (in land mass) to the US - our compensation and COL can vary so drastically.
No offence taken.
One of the issues I see with the US model is that an employer can be great about OOO, but they don’t have to be. This inevitable leads to a race towards the bottom where employees are treated worse than they should be.
I also realize that for someone outside the SWE bubble in the US, having great compensation at your day job and then have to take a call from home now and again sounds like heaven. In Sweden too, if you’re working for yourself then this kind of regulated hours is also a luxury.
Regarding stock compensation: because income tax is so high in Sweden, there have been countless ways to try to skirt that by employers by offering stuff like paid home cleaning, free parking, free computer hardware etc that the tax authorities have steadily clamped down on them. It’s not illegal to offer stock compensation, just that the tax hit is usually much larger.
I’m also not sure that there’s a direct connection between you and me working diligently at a company and the stock price rising in response. A stock can tank from any number of external factors, and if you’re relying on it to compensate you for your labor then you can lose a lot.
One of the issues I see with the US model is that an employer can be great about OOO, but they don’t have to be. This inevitable leads to a race towards the bottom where employees are treated worse than they should be.
This is my primary issue. It’s very easy for me to say “well I don’t mind on-call!” because my experience is completely unlike what I’ve read in the linked post of Alex (full disclosure, it’s not my kind of post so I read the section that was called out elsewhere and skimmed the rest). But I’m only in that position because of the leverage I have and the leverage my colleagues have. That leverage can go away at which point companies don’t have to be so nice at all - I’d rather regulation than “nice” in most cases.
I’m also not sure that there’s a direct connection between you and me working diligently at a company and the stock price rising in response.
I think it’ll vary. I’m currently at a relatively small company, which means I can have outsized impact on stock price, and collectively the engineering org is heavily invested in stock so I suspect many of us are on the same page there. I’ve definitely put in the extra hours and deals have been closed (in some small part, at least) because of it, the needle moves.
What I heard from people in Sweden, their net take home is rather low.
Rather low compared to what? US salaries are a global outlier, every other country’s salaries are rather low compared to that.
As a Spaniard, I’m sure Swedish median take-home pay would be eye-watering to me —plus we don’t have nearly as much labor protection.
but otherwise it’s not allowed
I mean good luck running an operational interest or a global business then. You can make it very unlikely that somebody is paged at night, but the very nature of the work makes it impossible to rule out.
If you’re a global business you can just hire someone in another country, right? That’s what the global security teams I’ve worked with have done to ensure full 24/7 coverage with redundancy (you don’t want to rely on someone waking up at 2am to handle a breach).
No, it’s possible that you’re local but you’re catering to a global audience.
If you have a global business, with a revenue that makes it unacceptable to be down during certain hours, you can afford someone in another timezone. You can probably also get away with squeezing your local staff, but that’s BS.
Small businesses often can’t afford to hire someone in another timezone (not only is it another salary, but it’s also legal and accounting overhead for dealing with international regulations and on top of that the productivity inefficiencies associated with having employees working out of band from your main staff). If you want to say, “if you can’t meet these regulations then you don’t deserve to survive!” then fine, but to my ears that just sounds like further increasing the already substantial moat enjoyed by large tech companies.
It’s a steep ask to employ somebody in a different timezone and onboard them on all relevant systems. I’d prefer local staff to be compensated for it and a commitment to minimize out of hours pages (which honestly, unless your engineering situation is a ridiculous trash fire is something you should be able to do easily).
Every company that has a website and can be interacted with electronically is a global business, to a first approximation. There are also a whole lot of org stresses that that introduces…most engineering orgs are barely eventually consistent, much less partition tolerant.
Hm. This sounds niche. A company is local only, has a need for 24/7 uptime due to being a global company with some sort of important uptime requirements, and is also unable to hire someone in a different time zone? I suppose it’s possible but I can’t imagine this is really holding Sweden back. I mean, they’re global, right? Don’t they have support people? Sales? How are they a global company that’s not around for 16 hours of the day?
That said, I imagine this would be the sort of thing that might make a startup harder in a niche circumstance.
I’m unclear about the law in Norway, but everywhere my SO and I have worked that requires an on call period you get a basic supplement for simply having the duty phone or being on call. Any additional work out of normal hours is paid at overtime rates. 1.5x or 2x depending on when it is.
To me this seems a logical and fair solution. If I’m on call it limits my choices in life. Being sober, near to the laptop or within 1h of the incident room etc. So the employer should compensate employees for this extra burden.
Machine translated
The ban on work between midnight and 5 a.m. means that the daily rest period must begin at midnight at the latest. In principle, it is a night work ban, but the law allows night work to be performed if it is necessary due to the nature of the work, the needs of the public or other special circumstances.
Exceptions include health care, hospitality, industry etc.
And as stated, any provisions of the law can be replaced by collective bargaining.
So this means effectively it is allowed if your employer puts in your contract that it is “the nature of the work” because this is the IT industry.
The only other way you can run a legal on-call rota here is by signing a union deal which will typically include a bunch of guarantees about things like paid parental leave and so on.
Did you miss this part?
The only other way you can run a legal on-call rota here is by signing a union deal which will typically include a bunch of guarantees about things like paid parental leave and so on.
I read that but didn’t fully get what it entails and coming from Germany it seems rather onerous. But I’ll trust the Nordics to have set this up in a way that’s relatively painless and pragmatic.
Here in Sweden it is expressly illegal to disturb the hours of rest between midnight and 5AM.
Are businesses not allowed to operate 24 hours per day? I can absolutely understand a law that would mandate such a period of rest for every worker, but I find it hard to grasp that a business would not be legally allowed to operate during those hours.
At my first job following university, we had staff that were at our datacenter from 7AM - 3PM, 3PM - 11PM and 11PM - 7AM. A rule that says you couldn’t call the 7-3 staff between 12 and 5 makes perfect sense to me. A rule that says you can’t have a job whose hours occupy that space at all is harder to understand.
It’s allowed if you need to. Swedish labour laws are (for the western world except the US) pretty minimalistic, and the details are instead worked out in collective bargaining between unions and the organizations of the employers.
In those industries that need it, the collective bargaining agreements includes rules for “inconvenient working hours”. For the biggest unions relevant to people working in IT, it’s usually that an extra hourly pay for work during those hours is calculated by dividing your monthly salary by some number.
This generally kicks in already at a lower level even outside of those hours the law talks about, but the compensation increases the more inconvenient the time or the more hours you work in a day. Typical would maybe be that you get 2x your salary working night, but if you already worked a full day and then gets called in during the night, you might start already at 3x because you already did 8 hours that day.
It’s also common to be able to exchange the work during inconvenient hours for a higher number of hours of free time. Or in other words work during those hours just count as more hours. It’s a pretty common scheme for example for nurses to work maybe 4 nights/week but being considered to work full time.
Some software/IT companies have not signed collective bargaining agreements but usually apply similar rules so as not to encourage their employees to join a union.
Poland is like that too. Which lead to my employer laying off all its Polish employees. :(
The only other way you can run a legal on-call rota here is by signing a union deal which will typically include a bunch of guarantees about things like paid parental leave and so on.
This is simply not true. I was working in Stockholm for a Swedish company, and I was on call 24 hours per day, one week at a time. I was not a part of a union, and none of my colleagues were either.
However, we got the friday following our on call week off, in line with legal rest obligations. We also got 9% of our monthly salary as compensation for each on call week. More if there is a critical incident which needs to be responded to.
I’d suggest that what you’re describing is probably just an illegal on-call rota. Rest assured that Section 13 of the Working Hours Act definitely exists. Employers do break the law however, even in Sweden.
roles that are critical to society itself
Heh. That’s what I happen to support. If this stuff gets broken a lot of actually important people get unhappy.
Honestly, it’s crazy to me that oncall compensation is not a more talked-about subject in this industry.
By the way: first part of this article is probably worth reading - it’s interesting - but not necessary. If you want the meat of it, skip to “Wait, you guys are getting paid?”
I started there, and looped back when I finished. I’m glad I did, but I didn’t need to.
To me, not putting a cost on on-call work is so weird. If the company had to pay for every incident, then maybe more work would be put into actually fixing the issues, gradually whittling them down to the only absolutely unavoidable, which could then be handled by fewer people, leading to less costs and a better product!
Instead this cost is externalized to employee’s free time, leading to burnout and unfixed problems.
I see everyone in the comments discussing the personal impact and how that’s mitigated by local law (and I 100% agree!), but I’ve been trying to impress on some people that “costly on-call” is actually a net positive for the company. Not everyone who gets to do on-call duty has the “benefit” of doing so with years of experience. Sometimes it’s your first time doing it or you are managed by people who have not experienced it. It’s easy to do wrong.
I’ve been pitching the value of clear signals and often use the analogy of: if you can’t feel it hurts, it’s easy to leave your hand on the stove top and hurt yourself pretty bad. Think burning out your staff, or falling in patterns where you don’t fix the root causes to your recurring incidents. By making on-call costly for the company with mechanisms like minimum 1h billable on-call, salty overtime pay, stand-by fees, no on-call schedule with fewer than 5 members, etc., you’re giving tools to managers with less experience to measure what they’re asking of their people. You think your text auto-completion feature really needs five nines of reliability per month, no problem bud, it’s going to cost you. You’ve neglected doing your postmortems and addressing your root causes, it’s going to cost you. That bill racks up really quick, and for most businesses money is a clear stimulus: they’ll react fairly quickly if they get punched in the … purse.
I think a lot of it is about creating an environment where it’s safe to make mistakes, and that includes the business at large. In my opinion it’s much safer for a business to lose a bit of profit now, but keep their staff and gain a good feedback loop for self-improvement along the way than the alternative. Now, not every business is a sane business, but I think it’s an interesting argument to make.
Several places I’ve worked in the past decade, there was no formal arrangement for on-call, and often no compensation (even time in lieu).
I’d expected, as a senior manager, for it to be difficult to get it changed. In fact (probably a testimony to the quality of the people at the places I’ve worked) it wasn’t. Mostly companies had just drifted into ad-hoc arrangements, and no-one with authority had ever questioned them.
It’s not possible to live life completely normally while staying prepared to handle any page at any time. It would perhaps be hyperbolic to compare the experience to that of being placed under house arrest, but it’s the closest a lot of us will ever get to experiencing that level of freedom-yet-confinement.
I would have considered the COVID-era lockdowns a much more accurate analogy. My time on-call is nowhere near as bad as Scott’s experience (and we get time off after each rotation), but “largely stuck hanging around the house and only able to make short out-and-back trips” matches both his story and many COVID lockdown policies.
I am going to pose what might sound like an unthinkable question: Is this important?
It is, but why is it? How come a page taking ten seconds to load at 2 AM makes me think it’s a shoddy operation built by an unskilled team?
I’ve built up an association between characteristics of web technology and an imagined cheapness or seriousness of the business. A local restaurant that paid a freelancer for a few hours of work has a certain standard for reliability, absence of broken links, etc., AWS has another.
For some reason I, the technology consumer, expect good web developers to achieve the latter. It’s strange, unfair, and, at least in my case, a bias I developed without any thought.
I wonder if attitudes can be shifted away from “more nines = better”. I’ve seen an overemphasis on reliability in outage postmortems for products where allowing for week-long interruptions would be totally fine, except that it “feels” shoddy because of distorted expectations of what software and web development should be.
It would perhaps be hyperbolic to compare the experience to that of being placed under house arrest, but it’s the closest a lot of us will ever get to experiencing that level of freedom-yet-confinement.
Indeed, I often call oncall shifts house arrest.
Highly recommend listening to the 70s country gem that the title is an homage to: Take This Job And Shove It by (the aptly named) Johnny Paycheck
on-call makes sense for some things
i normally don’t like unions, but if something is critical enough to wake someone at 3am for, i’d want to be in a union or a professional association or something. collective negotiation for the norms around it, and lawyers on call for when someone is looking to blame someone for an incident
(if i’m negotiating it on my own, the answer is always no, but less polite. or i’m a founder and doing it for free)
I was expecting the usual hot take “on-call is annoying to coders, relegate it to lowly devops” so I was pleasantly surprised this took a different turn. “I don’t like unions but we might need a union” is on the right track and only needs a tiny bit more self-reflection. I still believe that if there is an on-call rotation, it needs to include everyone responsible for creating the mess, not just “someone else” – but the points about why on-call probably shouldn’t exist at all are excellent.
everyone responsible for creating the mess
Pretty much. Alternatives would be stuff like “the person who experiences the on-call pain is allowed to hard veto any changes made by people who aren’t experiencing the pain” but that would be pretty weird itself anyway.
Czechia, EU here.
There are various arrangement around working at night, overtime and so on, but employer can work around those to a degree. What they cannot work around is that for standing by (being “on-call”) there must be a separate agreement and it cannot be unilaterally imposed. For standing by, the minimum compensation is 10% of the average base rate.
I think you are getting screwed over even more than us.
One of the happier days of my life was when I removed PagerDuty from all of my devices. On-call was ruinous to my health and I hope to never experience it again.
Meh. If you’re being paid 6 figures, the comp covers this extra work.
If I wanted to be paid less without on call, that would be doable.