I've been doing on-call for more than a decade and I feel I need to offer my perspective here. I worked in teams in which I would never get paged and also teams in which I'd get 100 alerts per week.
> But why? Why do you think oncall should be paid the same as full work? Perhaps you have a different definition of oncall than me, where you expect to be paged once or twice a week, and spend maybe an hour or so fixing it each time?
When I'm oncall, I need to cancel all my social engagements for that week and delegate all my errands and such to my partner. Also not drink or take any mind altering substances. I must be 'ready' at any time of day or night. I (as well as others) sleep in the same bed with my partner. If my phone rings due to an alert, my partner is also woken up. So I need to sleep in the living room for a week. From the start, this affects my personal life to the extent that it would be unfair NOT to compensate me extra. It also affects my family way more than a regular desk job should.
You're mentioning the expectation to be paged once or twice a week. If those pages come at odd hours and you need to fix them on the spot, no exceptions, failure is not an option, etc.. it's still very disturbing to your personal life. Additionally, that's a parameter which is well outside of your control. I've seen oncall shifts which turned from '1-2 pages a week' to '5-10 pages a day' after the product finally got in the hands of regular users or after the team grows in size and code contributions grow suddenly. Or even better, when you're doing such a great job that your boss promotes you in the oncall tier and now you also get to do triage for alerts coming for the whole organization.
The volume of the alerts don't and shouldn't matter. If you're oncall, you're oncall, you have a responsibility to be available at all times, rain or snow, night or day. This deserves compensation. It's the same as with regular work. Do you get paid extra when you merge more PRs? Nope. You're paid relative to the value you add to the company. Even if you have weeks in which you barely do anything. You're paid for your 'availability' first, then your work.
Some companies (some I've been lucky to work at) implement some sort of follow-the-sun oncall shift and you at least get to have your sleep and generally minimal impact on your personal life. That is great and does not deserve extra compensation, because your work hours aren't altered at all.
I'm sad that labor in the US don't consider paying extra for oncall a norm. But it's not surprising, considering we did have dedicated engineers at one time who were paid to watch and maintain the health of the livesite 24/7. But then we figured we'd make regular engineers fuck their sleep cycles by adding oncall to the list of responsibilities, because it would be cheaper this way. And everybody agreed, because 'full-service ownership' and we're already paid way more than in other fields. When the latter changes (and it will), we'll still not get paid oncall and I'd love to see the discussion when that happens.
It sounds like your oncall is far stricter and noisy than those I have experienced. It genuinely sounds like it is disrupting your life to a large extent.
"failure is not an option" is not something I recognise, in the same way that sometimes features cannot be implemented as quickly as wanted, and systems are not as bugfree as I would like. But I am expected to put in a professional level of effort.
In my experience of oncall, it means carrying my laptop to social events, not drinking, and apologising if my alarm goes off in the night. For that, I accept the deal that is offered, which is less than my normal hourly rate, but still substantial given the number of hours.
If the volume of pages increased, or the required response time was lowered, I would reconsider.
> From the start, this affects my personal life to the extent that it would be unfair NOT to compensate me extra.
I don't think anyone is arguing that people oncall shouldn't be compensated extra. It's obvious that you should be compensated for being oncall, it would be criminal not to do so in my opinion.
The difference is that it's not full time employment compensation, because you're not working your normal work expectations.
You're not working overtime because you are not working your expected 9to5 duties.
Overtime would be if you were actually sitting in front of your computer actively working on your project (coding, answering emails, bugs, feature requests, etc). Just being available counts as a remunerable activity but I don't think you'd be able to convince anyone that it counts as actual overtime duties like you would if you were actually overtime. It's "doing something" more than it is "doing nothing" but it's not as involved as actually "doing work" like you normally would. Hence, you are being paid for it, but it's not your full rate.
> But why? Why do you think oncall should be paid the same as full work? Perhaps you have a different definition of oncall than me, where you expect to be paged once or twice a week, and spend maybe an hour or so fixing it each time?
When I'm oncall, I need to cancel all my social engagements for that week and delegate all my errands and such to my partner. Also not drink or take any mind altering substances. I must be 'ready' at any time of day or night. I (as well as others) sleep in the same bed with my partner. If my phone rings due to an alert, my partner is also woken up. So I need to sleep in the living room for a week. From the start, this affects my personal life to the extent that it would be unfair NOT to compensate me extra. It also affects my family way more than a regular desk job should.
You're mentioning the expectation to be paged once or twice a week. If those pages come at odd hours and you need to fix them on the spot, no exceptions, failure is not an option, etc.. it's still very disturbing to your personal life. Additionally, that's a parameter which is well outside of your control. I've seen oncall shifts which turned from '1-2 pages a week' to '5-10 pages a day' after the product finally got in the hands of regular users or after the team grows in size and code contributions grow suddenly. Or even better, when you're doing such a great job that your boss promotes you in the oncall tier and now you also get to do triage for alerts coming for the whole organization.
The volume of the alerts don't and shouldn't matter. If you're oncall, you're oncall, you have a responsibility to be available at all times, rain or snow, night or day. This deserves compensation. It's the same as with regular work. Do you get paid extra when you merge more PRs? Nope. You're paid relative to the value you add to the company. Even if you have weeks in which you barely do anything. You're paid for your 'availability' first, then your work.
Some companies (some I've been lucky to work at) implement some sort of follow-the-sun oncall shift and you at least get to have your sleep and generally minimal impact on your personal life. That is great and does not deserve extra compensation, because your work hours aren't altered at all.
I'm sad that labor in the US don't consider paying extra for oncall a norm. But it's not surprising, considering we did have dedicated engineers at one time who were paid to watch and maintain the health of the livesite 24/7. But then we figured we'd make regular engineers fuck their sleep cycles by adding oncall to the list of responsibilities, because it would be cheaper this way. And everybody agreed, because 'full-service ownership' and we're already paid way more than in other fields. When the latter changes (and it will), we'll still not get paid oncall and I'd love to see the discussion when that happens.