Is there any WLB?
Hey all, Not ranting here. But I just got off a call with a team at Microsoft. I just learnt that the team has bi-weekly on call schedules for their dev's. So does that basically mean every other weekend a Developer is expected to be 10 mins away from his machine? Is that even a reasonable expectation. Do On call folks get any incentives? If not, how does anyone agree to that? Does the pay make up for it? #No I haven't interviewed yet. Just curious to know if this was common TC: 150k
This is very common
Devs are the labor. You think anyone thanks construction workers after a huge project? But guess who is on call to fix any issues.
This is toxic. But I guess that's the cost of high pay? On call every other weekend! I hope they pay their dev's upwards of half a million for the sacrifice of weekends!
That's why it's more and more important to find a team that doesn't suck. And teams that suck and have terrible wlb have their engineers run away so they are hiring aggressively
On call every other week is very rare. Most are every 6 weeks. Google pays for oncall. Microsoft and most others don’t so it is effectively free labor. Microsoft used to hire SREs to take the on call rotation but it took Amazon’s model which gets more out of an employee. Some Engineers are naive and try hard to say it is their responsibility, not knowing it is extra pay and a holiday at Google or old Microsoft. Most of the people with common sense think this is added responsibility without extra pay but some Blinders think you shouldn’t complain because you get paid well and your salary includes this responsibility and capitalism should allow the companies to make the employees work for whatever the hours they want. Laughably they are not a major shareholder, manager at best. I think this is a third world mindset where labor laws are poor but alas we have more engineers from the third world so this mentality won’t change and the leadership will favor these folks.
It was all good until you mentioned 3rd world laws.... Labor laws are way better than in the US in general
Kind of does make sense. As long as 3 out of 4 dev's in a team agree to do it, the SANE one here turns out be insane and gets called out as Not Proactive Doesn't take responsibility and so on. Only if everyone stood up, I bet these manager's would actually treat them as Software developer's not as Laborer's. .
Why? The team has two people?
Not sure about msft but on call thing is pretty common. Usually you don't do anything extra. Business just feels better when it knows whom to call in case of an emergency.