How do people fee about on call?
Not sure what other companies have on call similar to Amazon. Personally I dislike on call during non office hours. I’m fine with taking some time every few weeks to take a break from normal working and work on some issues, but I do not think I should have to be willing to work for Amazon during the night or weekends. My life does not revolve around Amazon. My teammate told me in Europe they get additional compensation during on call but not sure if that is true. What do other people think?
Slave shit
There should be a follow the sun model where you're on call for 12 hours a day. 24*7 on call is bull shit and shouldn't be encouraged. It just brings down the morale. And people have life outside of work.
Some teams have work hours on call and then another team in a different location takes over which is similar to this. Is he fine with 12 hours as well.
In a services world, on call is inevitable IMHO. Few companies have SRE to deal with it. Part of our regular job responsibilities, whether we like it or not.. and in that vein, might as well get used to it
The way I see it is a way to pay engineers the same but have them handle additional burden in the guise of "learning more about the overall system." This would be agreeable if engineers were paid for being diligent during on-call times.
One of the biggest companies in the world. Pays their employees crap. Won’t hire low cost on-call engineers. All so Jeffy B can be ultra-mega-rich. No thanks.
If you built a system that needs low cost operations folks 24/7 to keep it running you built a shit system and you deserve to feel the pain you caused. It's also likely a reflection on your management. Even within Amazon/AWS, most teams have very normal oncall loads.
I agree. That’s why you shouldn’t build systems like that. But every system occasionally needs a bump or logs pulled. Why bother your main engineers with those trivialities. Hire cheap heads for that & leave your good engineers rested, relaxed, & able to focus on solving real problems. The only reason is to run lean. This makes sense if you’re a start up; it’s just greed/oppression of your workforce when you’re the richest man in the world.
They don't technically pay us for the weekend hours worked. Our salary is 40 hrs/wk based. On call I can work up to 5-10 hours extra. My solution is to not report my time off.
Used to be on call at some company. New company, never on call. One of the best decisions of my life. Would gladly take 50k less but i end up making about 50k more.
If you work in Infrastructure support it's tough to not be on-call unfortunately. The idea is to rotate and take turns, but junior people often have to call more senior people anyway depending on the issue, so if you're a senior person you get called all the time anyway.
One of the few positives is that I actually factor it in when I’m designing and implementing stuff. “Will this cause me or a team member to get paged at 3am on a Sunday night”. So, I guess my work is far more fault tolerant defensive
You’re always going to be more aware when you or someone you know gets affected by your actions. That’s human psychology fam.
I wish my old team was like this. I’d get countless calls from PRs other teammates checked-in, so much so that I begged for the day my stuff broke something (instead of always having to deal with others’ stuff breaking). It made me scared anytime I saw a PR go in that I hadn’t looked through.
Sucks and we should be paid overtime when working off hours
You are a salaried employee compensated with stock and base pay. Are you saying you would prefer to be hourly paid and fill out a time sheet?
Won’t do it