Being a salaried employee obviously requires working extended hours, however we find ourselves frequently "on-call" without an official schedule to accommodate as such. An example, I've ended my work week Friday night (m-f is my work schedule) but then Saturday morning I get a flurry of slack messages for a small issue on the site (not an outage) to fix. This happens frequently and interferes with my personal life and ability to pursue personal interests outside of work. I want to know if 1.) Do I legally have to be paid as on call? 2.) Is this a violation of any employment statuate?
thats a consideration, but I'm just curious if anyone has insight into this type of situation
collect info and sue it when you leave
Is this your first startup ? This is normal in early stage startups. Generally, the unwritten rule is if you worked weekends or nights, you are free to take days off (without filing PTO) when the work load is a bit low.
not a startup
If you're exempt (salaried), the company is well within its right to dictate your work schedule however they want. Your only argument is that you're misclassified as exempt when you should be non-exempt. If you're doing tier 1 support for a website, that's highly tactical work, and you might have an argument. In which case you'd be owed back OT and breaks. If you're slinging code or doing higher level website architecture work, as long as you make above a minimum salary threshold, you have no recourse except try to negotiate for more money or go elsewhere.
Why are you answering slack messages at the weekend? Take all work shit off your phone unless you have a work phone.
Have the conversation with your manager about time trading, like fetrsev said, you work a night or weekend, you should definitely expect to be able to take the next day off, or if it’s hectic, bank it and spend it later. You should also push for them to implement an official incident management process and on-call rotation. Like MoxL22 said, take slack off of your phone. If they want you to do on-call shifts, then they’re going to have to pay for your phone bill, at a minimum, and getting pinged on slack is not an appropriate way to raise an incident. I used to work on-call but I still muted slack on nights and weekends. If someone needed to get a hold of me, then they had to push the big red button and page me via PagerDuty, and only once the issue they were dealing with met a certain threshold of severity or urgency. If that process and escalation criteria aren’t formally documented, then push the organization to do it, it will save you many sleepless nights
It’s a fair question but if you ask too loudly you may find yourself getting shut down with counter arguments about commitment and getting the job done. Corporate culture in the valley doesn’t give a shit about your person.