Thread by @sarahmei

My fundamental issue with being on call is that I care more about my personal life & health than I do about whether my employer’s website is operational.

I assume everyone does! So...why do we put up with on-call at all?🤔

Maybe there’s something to this labor solidarity thing

I live in the Presidio, in San Francisco, which is a former military base that now has thousands of people living on it, renting about 50 different types of former military housing.

The Presidio has a whole huge maintenance department who keep it all running. They mostly operate during normal business hours, but there’s an after hours line you can call for emergencies, which I have a few times. When it’s a real emergency, they send their on-call person over.

Once during one of these incidents (when disgusting water started spontaneously rising, and fast, from the drain of my kitchen sink a few Chtistmases ago...) I chatted with the on call person about how the system works.

I was trying to be friendly, “sorry you have to come over here on Christmas,” but he explained that on call is actually in high demand among the staff, and it’s mostly the folks with more seniority who get to do it.

I was like

For every on call shift they take, they get paid 2x for ALL the time, whether there are incidents or not, PLUS they get an extra vacation day. Most of them live on the Presidio, so they can chill at home unless an incident comes up that they need to go fix.

The guy fixing my sink was an electrician, but he knew enough about the plumbing to triage until a more permanent fix could be applied by the plumbers, once they were back to normal business after the holiday.

It sounded a lot like how on-call could work in software, too.

There’s no reason we couldn’t make afterhours on-call something people WANT to do.

It takes a combination of quality controls (so interrupts are infrequent) and incentives (so staff who can participate feel compensated, and staff who can’t participate aren’t penalized).

As long as the way we think about after hours on-call is “an onerous burden that everyone has to share,” we’re going to keep having these arguments - about who should do it, and when, and who gets to opt out, and who doesn’t.

An objection I hear a lot to compensating afterhours on-call is that most folks in software are “exempt” employees, which is a legal status in the US.

Being exempt means your employer doesn’t have to pay you for afterhours work, which, of course, this obviously is.

But it’s totally legal for an employer compensate an exempt employee beyond salary. We had a whole discussion about “total compensation” & bonuses & all that yesterday, remember? 😊

https://twitter.com/sarahmei/status/1078019947492569088

There’s nothing preventing our employers from compensating us for on-call status. But...there’s nothing requiring it, either.

Here’s the thing though.

We don’t need a law to require it.

Seriously. Talk to your teammates. Put together a plan. Figure out what makes sense. Start from the (correct) premise that this is a serious morale issue impeding communication between groups and placing unfair burdens on some team members.

Eventually, like with many other advances in worker health such as “weekends,” we’ll need a law, because there are some companies so driven by short-term costs that they won’t be able to make this transition.

But for now, work locally. Lay the groundwork. It CAN happen.