I'm usually on call for three or four days in a row once or twice a month. Schedules are flexible. We just enter dates when we're not available into our calendar and this insane piece of inhouse software looks at our oncall history and determines a fair schedule, so everyone gets the same amount of oncall time. It even takes into account weekends (which are typically very quiet, but you still need to be within mobile-signal-or-coffee-shop range).

Pager load is typically one or two a day, and are usually fairly trivial; far more annoying are the non-paging alerts and paperwork. Sometimes there's a pager storm as something catches fire and burns down, but there's always someone around to help when that happens.

Being on-call here is... never something I look forward to, but the systems are in place to give support if I need it, and I'm never on for very long. The culture here emphasises that when my shift is over, particularly when there's a crisis, I hand over to the next person (in the other team) and then GO HOME, because otherwise I'll burn out.

With that said; my Fiancee is a trainee nurse. She works three thirteen hour shifts a week. Which totally destroys your sleep pattern. Working two thirteen hour days in a row takes you out for a couple of days (she gets in at 9, has about an hour to shower and eat and is in bed for a 5am start).

All of this for a wage which is about half of mine. And with the massive responsibility that if she's tired and makes a mistake it's not a computer that dies but an actual person.

Puts it in perspective.

In Grey's Anatomy, you often see people taking a couple of hours sleep mid shift; is this generally accurate?

2000's, I worked at a call center and then a large software company in Bangalore. Late nights, weekends and sometimes even doing consecutive days(2-3 days) at office were common. Some people I known of have clocked a record 7 days at office, sleeping in dorms for 4 hours per day. None of us complained, because merely getting a job in those situations was a blessing. Who would mind atrocious working hours, where the next option is bankruptcy.

My father was a truck driver, then a bus driver and is now a taxi driver. Most of his life he pretty much went perennially sleep deprived, tiring work driving all time. With no access to food, good sleeping conditions or even a rest room.

In fact this is pretty much how bulk of world works to make a living.

Recently, in the last 4-5 years. I had a day job and was doing my start up on the side. 10-11 hours at office and 6-9 hours of start up work at home was common. Getting barely 5 hours of sleep after a grueling day of very hard work, tense situations and routine crippling failures are common.

I would say human life is very hard. That's how it is by default.

If you like long hours and chaos, work in the ER. if 5A-2P works, be a surgical nurse. There are lots of options that you can study for and get into. Also, in many states you're hourly, so you get paid.

Less so with tech.

Personally I have folded companies, quit jobs, and turned away opprotunities that represented substantially more than I make now. People have called these choices foolish but my life honestly rocks right now. Today I am happy, productive at a job I enjoy, and have time to spend with the people that matter, so who cares what other people consider logical?

Optimize for work-life balance, not bank account balance.

Some of us can quit. Amazon employees in Seattle are probably in a better position than most in this respect, but many people in this industry are not so lucky.

You bother because getting it right is worth it, and when you do you won't regret having a few failed attempts getting there. It is a big world with a lot of positive opprotunities. Go find yours :)

Because it's cheaper to burn out your existing employees, fire them for non-performance, and then hire (and lie to) new employees who don't know what's going on.

The problem here is "on call". Why not "on duty"? If I'm getting paid for the midnight shift one week out of four, that's annoying, but manageable. If I'm getting paid for 40 hours a week, but I'm "on call" 24/7, 365 days a year, that's abusive.

I won't say the system is perfect, but when the company incurs a cost for being legally obligated to pay more for more work, I think the employment social contract becomes more fair. Aside from top level executives (CEO, etc.), I'm not exactly sure I can find a reason that people should be classified as exempt.

Lawyers and doctors are the often cited examples of exempt employees. Sorry, if an attorney spends a few more hours one week on trial prep, his firm is billing for it, so pay him/her more. Similarly, if a surgeon's operation goes sideways and ends up taking two hours more, pay him/her more.

If the idea that any labor past 40 hours in a week was "free labor" for a company was discarded (or better yet, actually cost the company more than the first 40 hours, i.e., "overtime"), we could reduce the number of people who are working more than 40 hours per week and start hiring more unemployed people. On a micro-scale, does it make sense to have 4 people consistently working 50 hours each with 1 unemployed person, or does it make more sense to have 5 people consistently working 40 hours per week?

While you're at it, maybe 35 (or 30?) is the new 40?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time#Gradual_decrease_...

Ouch!

When our team was asked to be on-call (this was a few years ago at another company), we negotiated a fixed monthly bonus and I don't think we would have continued to be "on-call" if they had reneged on that. I think it was even in our contract. How did they take that away from you? Is it in your job description that you need to be on-call?

We also had a high priority "fix what broke" strategy that was also management approved: whenever something went wrong at 3am, the next day our top priority was to try and ensure that did not happen again, ever. Our interests were aligned with management here: management wanted as little downtime as possible for the web services, we wanted as little interruption to sleep as possible.

How often do you get calls/messages on average? Is there anything you can do to reduce them by improving the actual things that are breaking?

On-call means you can't get drunk, go see a movie, visit distant friends or whatever. It's a significant impact on your life - plus, of course, you're expected to work your normal full day after a hard night. I simply stopped going out to bars with my friends, even though I wasn't drinking. The benefit of socialising didn't make up for standing in a cold alleyway in winter talking an enduser through a tech problem for 45 minutes at a time.

"Fuck you, pay me" applies here. Salary is for normal work hours - on-call spreads that to 24/7 for a week. On-call is also not trivial, so it shouldn't pay peanuts. Remember it's the company that wants 24/7 coverage; it should be a cost to the company to provide that. I'm a 'best effort' guy, and I don't like to see my stuff failing. I'd rather fix it on my own time than let it rot until business hours roll around. But I'm not giving my employer priority time over the my personal life for free.

If ever you need a question for that part in job interviews, on-call is a good one. Also worth scrutinising in the contract.

We have at-will employment here, so a contract change is basically, "accept the change or go someplace else to work." Which works against us in a down economy in a position that still pays better than most other companies would for the same work.

I make around $70k myself. The average here is around $50k. Moving's not really an option due to family. Maybe in 4-5 more years moving will be on the table, but by then I'll be closing in on 40.

We probably get around 3-4 calls a week, usually between 1am and 8am (non-staffed hours), and another 6-12 text message alerts a week. Some weeks are better, some are worse. My issue is once I've woken up to handle something, it takes me a good 1-2 hours to fall back asleep again. I obviously can't treat that with sleeping pills since I need to be able to wake up again. So I go the opposite route and try to keep myself awake when I need to be.

We can't do much to fix outage issues, as we're part of a larger organization, and we monitor processes for everyone else. It's our job to contact their on-call support staff to get things fixed.

I think the idea was to relieve all of the tier-3 teams from needing to implement their own separate, patch-work application health monitoring systems; and instead centralize all of the monitoring to one team. Some of the better teams do have their own health monitoring as well; and in those cases, we're more of the "fallback" in case their monitoring doesn't catch issues.

Just another reason why opening an office in Europe is great for a company at some stage of its growth.

In any case, I only hire people who demonstrate the ability to think logically rather than emotionally - it's vital in software roles.

(+ some de facto laws in other countries within certain sectors dominated by strong unions tightly connected with Socialist parties.)

- Work councils get input in whether you can lay someone off - it's a far cry from at-will employment.

- Pretty insane laws surrounding pregnancy - you have give a pregnant woman the option (with no obligation on her part) to return to work a year later. I'm told the best way to survive a restructuring is strategic pregnancy.

All told, it was vastly more difficult than the US (where she had come from). I know in France you can only fire for cause.

In contrast India is pretty easy. It's a simple trade of money for labour, provided you stay out of the communist states. (Which of course you will if you are hiring devs.) The cost difference is actually only a minor reason to hire here - European devs are highly underpaid, and Indian devs are very much not.

Ok, so that's RBS then. For the record, that bank embodies everything that's wrong with the UK banking system: huge, completely out of control before the crash, totally sclerotic internally, top-down managed, etc etc. Think of anything bad about banks you've ever heard; RBS is it.

> - it's a far cry from at-will employment.

And thank god for that. This island is still in Europe (at least until next year), and in Europe we have this old-fashioned notion of workers' rights, including basic respect for human beings. Firing people from one day to the next is barbaric, especially in huge organizations like RBS where you can probably give anyone a chance in some other department.

> - Pretty insane laws surrounding pregnancy

Honestly, sir, a bit of decency is called for. Do you really think people would get pregnant just to get some time off? We are not talking about benefit scroungers, these are middle-class workers for whom a kid is a big deal, financially and psychologically. I honestly don't see anyone getting "strategically pregnant" just to gain some time.

Btw, pregnancy laws came about because employers were being complete dicks, firing female employees as soon as they got pregnant. They would then have the gall to show up in church and talk of human values they clearly knew nothing about.

> In contrast India is pretty easy

Well done you for exploiting the reserve army of labor, that time-honored tradition of mean ruling classes. You are a shining beacon of progress to all of us. Have a good day, sir.

I guess it's all much easier when you can just fire them.

I'm told the best way to survive a restructuring is strategic pregnancy.

Incredibly, despite this obvious benefit, pregnancy is primarily seen as a good way to have a kid when you want one.

They just herded every one into a big room and said "company is bust - there is a pile of the RB2 forms over there"

I'm also not familiar with anyone who has got pregnant to avoid layoffs, if nothing else given the cost of raising a child it seems like a very poor tradeoff.

A) Laid off in a bad economy, hunt for job, maybe find something. Then have children at age 33 or 34, only a couple of years into a new gig. (In banking they consider a couple of years to be a short time.)

B) Get pregnant at age 30 instead, avoid the current restructuring, and if you do hit the job market it'll be in a much better economy.

Really? You can't possibly see the benefit of (B)?

Said no worker ever.