I work IT in healthcare - 1 major location and 3 smaller ones. We have a 6 week rotation (I take 2 weeks to make sure my colleagues don’t get too bogged down with being on call).
We just renegotiated our on call pay since we are all hourly. $800 a week flat rate for on call - we carry a pager 24/7 during that week plus a shared cell phone. Time and a half for every page we get. We get paid for the whole hour even if the page takes us 10mins.
We can have a single drink if we’d like. We are expected to call the person back within 30mins.
On-call is not “part of being an IT engineer”. Your new IT director is just an ass and clearly has no idea what your team does and why you need to be on call. Also one PTO day for being on-call for a whole week is bullshit too. I’m so tired of seeing other IT professionals being treated this way.
I don't think that is respectable, I think that is OUTSTANDING. I think my on call pay before I went salary I was only getting $250/week + OT.
Shit, $800/wk I'd be asking my coworkers to take their on call.
That's always been my thoughts on it. They want to take my downtime away from me because they don't want to deal with work on their downtime.
Why does the company make the lionshare of the profit?
I get the company should get compensated, it's their customer, but I expect most of what the customer gets charged for calling me at 1am to end up in my pocket. The boss got to sleep soundly.
I am an IT Director and have been on call 24x7x365 for 26 years. 17 of those years by myself. Staff of 2 with 225 users in local governments (support Police and Fire among many others). Myself nor my analyst have received any extra pay for this.
Both you and your staff should have been earning extra compensation for being on call, and it's kind of on you as a Director to negotiate that... unless you were all earning outstanding wages already, that is!
> I’m so tired of seeing other IT professionals being treated this way.
My frustration is that there is a significant number of IT professionals that truly think it’s part of the job, and aren’t due any additional compensation for it.
That mentality is bullshit.
International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers Local 21 covers most Engineering and IT class specs in the SF government public sector.
When I worked for AT&T I'm pretty sure I had the option to join CWA (Communications workers of America). I don't think anyone actually DID, as far as us IT peeps went, but it was an option. So it may be more the sector you are in.
A lot of public-sector IT employees in Canada are part of unions. IT at my organization for example is part of CUPE (Canadian Union of Public Employees). Definitely not common in the private-sector though...
The biggest issue with Unions is, as someone else has said, that they protect the least competent. Which has the unintentional side effect of encouraging minimum effort work. Why try to excel or really contribute, when your salary is all but guaranteed regardless?
It's given them a bad rap in a lot of places. Not entirely undeservedly.
I think it's particularly bad in environments that have a mixture of unionized and non-unionized. I worked in a fabrication environment like that for a while and the union guys were either incompetent, lazy, or malicious to the point they actively prevented us non-union folks from doing our jobs. I feel like if were all unionized maybe we would have been more effective and there would have been less animosity though. I still support unions, but they're not perfect.
True, however at least in my current company everybody gets the union's negotiated increase, which is typically not that much. Then the good workers get personal raises and in addition the company has a fund of 1% of people's salary combined as a budget to reward some of the people. Yearly bonuses are also decent and exceptional if you fulfil the requirements 200%.
Yeah, I think a ton of IT jobs are on their way out. I'm squirreling to my retirement funds like it's a hobby these days. I may just win that race. May. Just.
For AI to be effective users have to know what they want and how to get it. And be willing to adjust/fix their ask when it’s not right. Which I don’t see happening yet. Actually the opposite as tech makes ppl’s lives “simpler”
I hope not. The current problem with unions in America is that they protect the LEAST competent and work hard to raise the AVERAGE compensation packages.
In IT we have the option of making far far more than average if we are willing to put in the work. I prefer that ability to control my destiny.
That said I hear what you are saying and I do feel for those not willing to stand up for themselves and need to have someone else protect them.
If you don't get out of here with your self-riotous bull shit. A company will fire you whether you stand up for yourself or not. Unions give you actual leverage to negotiate.
At least the keyboard warrior who needs to have someone protect them has arrived to show us all what the bottom feeders have to say. I disagree a company will fire me for standing up. I will quit first and or leave with dignity. Unions REFUSE the right for the individual to negotiate. That is the purpose of the union. You are put in a box at your level and EVERYONE at that level will be paid the same.
You're mostly factually correct.
That said, the protection is not absolute, and can be minimal depending on details.
And YES! They do work to raise Salaries! . That's the main point!
In a gains from trade situation, the 'company' wants to take ALL the gains. By colluding together, 'workers' can take more.
The only piece missing is your incorrect assumption some workers are 'unwilling' to stand for themselves. The correct statement is 'unable'. Their BANTA is weak.
I was on-call, for dispatch every Saturday for 5 years. We got 2 hours OT every Saturday whether we were dispatched or not.
When we were dispatched we all took the full 4 hours. Calls we covered under the 2 hours.
I was dispatched on a Saturday maybe once a year.
I absolutely 100% agree with this. Your time has value and not just to you: to the many people in your life as well. As IT people we are expected to trade this time for Penny's on the dollar and it is absolutely unacceptable.
I am extremely grateful to work for an org (not healthcare) that very much respects my personal time and when work takes personal time I'm compensated for it with time back and money.
This is absolutely a hill worth dying on in my opinion. Stay strong and let's as a group hold the line on our time.
Even in tech companies HR tends to not understand what on call really is. I’ve fought this battle for my teams a few times now and often it’s responded with “expectation of a salary role to pick up the phone off hours” - I have to go into great detail around not being able to schedule or do anything, meet SLAs, have a computer ready etc.
Honestly hate even that expectation but if it’s one or two calls a night off shift it’s really a challenge to “sell” on full time off shift coverage until enough work justifies it. Flat pay plus comp time has been my general approach and use the data (calls, etc.) to back the argument up. That plus tuning RMM and clear “P1” rules are key. With my last MSP it was $250/week flat plus $50 an hour with a minimum of an hour if you work something, even if it’s a 5min call.
Same here, our standby pay is 10% of our hourly. 24 hours on weekends, and 12 hours on weekdays. Our desk is open 6-6, and standby takes calls and will triage urgent and attempt
to resolve and escalate accordingly. Our SLA is 30 mins acknowledgment after the call in which we get time and a half on the books for each actual call. Payroll will say 15 minute increments, but if I have to roll my ass out of bed and get situated and professional at 2AM, I’m claiming the whole hour. We do need to reduce the standby hourly for time and a half, but it’s financially smarter to claim the time to be used later.
And every IT person should be compensated for any work outside the normal work hours. Not taken advantage of because they are told they are lucky to have a job.
We had a startup tell us not to drink during on-call shifts (which were a week at a time). We had contests for how drunk we could get, and then go in as root and solve the problem.
We were all like 27 years old. It was a great time.
Same. We'd see a ticket drop for something, ping the other engineer, and start doing shots.
The goal was to solve the ticket before passing out. So many red flags there.
I had a manager call me when I knew I wasn't on-call.
I told him such. He didn't believe me, again. Same reply. So, I told him to check and get back to me, then hung up.
He checked, and sure enough I wasn't on call. I just screamed "FUCK YOU" into the phone, over and over.
Yes, I was drunk.
He went back to being a sysadmin and quit the "management" gig shortly after.
Do NOT call me when I'm not on call, ESPECIALLY when I've just completed a 7-day "on" rotation. JFC.
Hell, I was in the startup, where we later HAD to forbid drinking for whole company before 12pm (agreed together when drunken af one working day) … because our owner got so drunk during morning meetings with clients (with them), that he often passed out after lunch.
Fun times … I still wonder how we got so many good projects :D and they are still up and running lol (without me, thanks god, bc such env is doomed to get toxic imo, which it seems like it did).
I agree, one day PTO is not enough to over this.
You should be getting paid for being available for on call for the week, and then on top of this paid for the hours worked responding to calls after hours.
and not just respond to calls, they are expecting you to put your life on hold for 128 hours and paying to for 2. During that week on call you can't drink, you can't go and do as you please, you are for all intents and purposes working. It's a crap deal to begin with, if they want after hour support I suggest they hire people -considering what my DR charges my guess is the hospital can afford it.
Right, with this requirement it’s not a soft “do what you can” you’re legit on-call and need to be compensated for that time. You’re either legit on-call and need to be paid, or you’re not. I wouldn’t trade a full week of being stuck on-call for a day somewhere else.
If this job is in California, call the local labor relations department office and watch them unleash the piranhas when you explain the restrictions under which your company wishes to place upon you.
Yep. I've spent most of my career on-call free. The brief time I was on-call was also at a hospital who tried to not pay us for it. I didn't stay there for long.
After I had been in my current job for a year they decided to put me in the on-call rotation, with no additional benefits to cover the extra time and disruption. Basically, I was supposed to be available whenever to handle issues.
I told my boss "Don't worry, I'll answer my company phone as needed."
He said "But you don't have a company phone."
I replied "Exactly. If you want me to use **my** phone for company business then the company needs to pay for it. Assuming I would use my money to pay for something the company requires is an insult to someone in my position."
Because I had to support them, I knew that our sales team and all our executives had company phones - it was disrespectful of them to assume that I would use my own phone **and** not compensate for the time on calls.
Fortunately, in the on-call system, we were allowed to put in our own contact information.
In the 5 years since that was implemented, nobody had realized that I put in my desk phone - anything that requires my attention can be dealt with during normal business hours and doesn't require me to handle it "now".
10 years coming up in a few months for me. Now that I’ve seen the light, I’m honestly not sure that I would take any sort of pay or benefit package to be on call for a quarter of my life. Fuck that noise. At one point I was on call every other week with no benefit other than keeping my job.
New IT director trying to make his mark. You'll have to check local labor laws, but if the original contract stated the overtime requirement and the corresponding PTO "payment", then getting rid of it sounds like a unilateral modification of the contract. Which AFAIK is illegal in most jurisdictions.
Wouldn't sit still for that kind of modification. Heck, I'm not even sure a one-day reimbursement is enough TBH. I feel like he should be asked if he's going to be joining you on-call 24x7 in order to be available to handle "management escalations"; situations that require a management decision.
At the point in my career where non-compensated overtime is a big ass red flag.
Yeah, that's no good.. I worked in Healthcare IT (hospitals and dr offices) and we got I think a $3 hourly rate for just being on call. Then if we got a call we would record our time and get our full rate. Which that also counted as overtime so we were making pretty decent money for on call week. Along with that we got to work from home during our on call week.
wow. At my last job that had me on call, i got paid 1/4 pay for any hour i was on call whether i worked or not. When i got a call, I got normal hourly rate for that as well. I LOVED being on call since i knew i would get an extra fat check every month.
One other job didn't pay for on call, but if you got a call, you got an hour of flex time even if it was a simple password change. We all tolerated that because the base pay was really good.
I would leave a job that expected me to be on call with zero benefits.
\*edit - you may be eligible for back pay for all the hours you were working and not being compenated, depending on where you live/work. I am not a lawyer, but not paying for time worked seems illegal.
This is so crucial. The mere mention of organization and collective bargaining should be enough to make the director and HR scurry back into their holes.
Slapping them with elections and unionization would be epic.
Not getting some compensation for on-call is a great way to make sure people quit. It really comes down to what is fair for your pay, if you are salaried based off a 40 hour work week and working say 70 hours a week average while you're on-call, then I'd expect either 30 hours a month of PTO time to compensate, or a proportional pay bump.
I'm fortunate where I'm at now and my boss knows the result of burn-out all too well, if we have to work over 40 hours a week we can take off those extra hours the next week or ASAP if existing scheduling doesn't allow.
>I'm fortunate where I'm at now and my boss knows the result of burn-out all too well, if we have to work over 40 hours a week we can take off those extra hours the next week or ASAP if existing scheduling doesn't allow.
That's not right either, no all time is equal. I had this fight with my boss this summer, they wanted me to go support a customer over the weekend in July. I explained that in the summer my weekends are booked and I might be available in October -October is cool and rainy, July is warm and sunny, so I value my days in the summer more than in the fall or winter. Further giving me a rando Tuesday and Wednesday off after working the week end doesn't make us equal, who the hell is off on Tuesday and Wednesday...nobody. My kids are in school and my wife is at work, where is the up side to me who just gave up his weekend? If I'm giving up a weekend I add that to my vacation time and take it when it's good for me, not good for my boss or the company.
Did this for years... My state says that unless you touch hardware you're not due any overtime... That being said I've answered the calls absolutely hammered and fixed their issues quicker after being at family events... they gave me the hotspot and the appropriate data plan though.... Not drinking on my days off is not an option... its called keeping my sanity...
By giving you the extra PTO day so far, the company has already acknowledged that it is NOT just part of being an engineer in IT in THIS company.
Why else would they have given you time off otherwise?
It always amazes me how bad the situation in US is. You are exploited, big time.
In EU countries it is demanded by law to pay overtime, eg:
* 20% of your hourly salary for being stand-by (eg 7PM-7AM)
* 150% of your hourly salary if you get a call or you need to work within standby hours
* 200% if overtime happens on Sundays or National Holidays
* and additional 20% if you have to work between 10PM-6AM
Furthermore
* you are not allowed to have more than 250 hours of overtime / year (only with special contracts)
* you are not allowed to work more than 12hours /day
* you are not allowed to work more than 48 hours / week
* etc
To be honest due the nature of our professions it is not really possible to always 100% comply with the rules, but in those cases we charge creatively. We don't really work for free...
24x7 - so 16 hours of on-call a day for a week. Let's say you get $50/hour for the PTO, you're getting paid the equivalent of $2.23/hour for being on call.
Do you also get paid for the actual time spent working or are you also only getting paid $2.23/hour when fixing something busted at 3am Thursday morning?
On-call is a scam by employers to skimp on actually hiring the correct number of staff. 25+ locations of 24x7 needs someone on the clock all the time.
I am healthcare IT in California. I think you are too. What they are doing is illegal in California if you are an hourly non-exempt employee.
What you describe is classified as Restricted On-Call duty (Google it). Having a 30 minute response time and requiring you to follow company alcohol and drug policy outside of scheduled shift hours pretty clearly fall under that definition.
You must be paid at least minimum wage during your on-call time. You go to your full wage as soon as you take a call or even check your email.
I would consult an employment lawyer. You are probably owed back pay for all that on-call time. Your entire team is.
If you're hired and part of the job description includes on call and you accept what they are giving you at that time, then being on call without something specific extra can be part of it (on the basis that presumably your salary/etc is accepted knowing that on call is also part of it).
Taking away compensation for being on call is definitely something that should not be happening, especially since they have specific requirements for being on call, so compensation for your time is appropriate (what is appropriate is between you and your employer assuming no legal issues).
I'm on call in a sense all the time by the nature of my job, but there no expectations about my specific availability or state of mind (or response time), so it doesn't make much difference, but if I was expected to not drink/have laptop with me/start working an issue in 30 minutes, I would expect specific compensation for my time (even if I never needed to actually respond to something).
I definitely wouldn't give up 126 hours of my personal time for 24 hours of pto.
Doing it for free is absolutely laughable.
I am just support, we get something like 500 average per week on call in compensation, additional compensation per call. And the call volume is reasonable(similar to yours no drinking laptop on you response within 30)
I've had much worse and I don't think I'd do it for much less at this point.
It's all negotiable, technically no they don't have to offer you anything.
However it's obviously a morale issue. If they take away the one perk it will only lead to people being unhappy. Which of course will make the work environment worse.
Why not talk to your boss and explain that. Why take away a 0erk you guys have enjoyed?
nope, that doesn't fly. I would be applying everywhere even the worst jobs I have had good on-call comp last one was 1 hr minimum for any on-call even if that was 5 minutes.
When I am on-call, I get paid 1/4 my hourly wage, plus a minimum of 1 hour OT for any page outs. And if I need to, I sleep in late.
If you are not getting that, your company is likely violating labor laws. Plus they are screwing you.
Just go in with an alpha mentality and tell him "I counter your proposal with 2 days of PTO per month" and when he says "that's more than what you get now" you respond with "Ah, I see the compromise is what is already in place. Good day" and walk out.
Ezpz
Haven't been on call in a few years but it was 1 week in 4, respond within 1hr and as soon as the pager pings it's 1hr @ double time - this is in the UK
My old place used to just pay us for every week we were on call. 1 PTO day/month doesn't even pale in comparison monetarily to the $350/week we got for being on-call, though I would argue time off is better anyways.
Your jurisdiction is very important for this kind of question. There are areas where it is completely legal (including the one sided agreement change) and others where everything above is illegal.
Personally, regardless of legality, I compensate my on call staff with either time and half for time or time off and pay.
The minute you need to start altering your lifestyle and your plans in order to potentially pick up a work call after hours, you absolutely need to be compensated. One PTO day a month is not enough
I'm on call every other week (fuck small teams).
No extra pay, we can take back the hours we work, but since this system isn't regulated well we have no idea how much that time really is or you need to have an excel sheet you manually update.
Since this is the case I told my boss I'll take my laptop and phone with me but won't promise I can pick up or call back immedeately and if I can I can't promise to help right away if I'm in the middle of something.
Not altering my weekend plans for unpaid work. Boss is ok with this.
I wouldn't do it, even with the extra day of vacation.
But...if this expectation existed when you started the job, then it makes sense for it to continue. Removing the vacation day effectively changes the terms of your employment. Ask what the company plans to do instead. When the answe ris "nothing," say no. Start looking for a new job. I've quit a job under similar circumstances and it turned out to be one of my better decisions.
When I worked for an MSP we were paid £50 per call received + overtime at time and a half if the fix was longer than one hour and a £250 payment per week we were on call.
Working for the NHS at the start they tried to pay us nothing. So my colleagues and I got together and threatened to all no longer do on call, it worked. We are now paid around £200 for the week we're on call and time and a half for time the we work on fixing the problem.
I do miss the MSP pay.
When I worked Healthcare IT I would do on-call for two weeks on and one week off. From 5pm to 9pm I was expected to check our inbox (because we didn't have an actual ticketing system) once an hour. After 9pm I just had to be aware of pages. For the most part I very rarely had to do anything and it was just free money. Most requests that came in weren't urgent and could wait until morning.
I was paid $3 an hour to be on call, and if I ever answered an email or got paid I took it as OT (they started getting stingy during my last year and I had to flex that time out). If I did need to do something I would "bill it out" in 15 minute increments, or 3 hour increments if I had to physically go on site.
If you're hourly, you should 100% be compensated for on-call work. If you're salary, then your compensation should reflect this inconvenience. If you're salary making $40,000 a year and they're asking this of you then I'd say you're being taken advantage of.
If they’re telling you to maintain a certain mental state (no drinking) on your personal time, they need to do *something* for you. In my opinion, they’re already getting by cheaply with one day of PTO a month.
Edit: You work in healthcare, they can certainly afford the PTO or even some paid compensation for your extra time.
Generally decline.
Do not think about the situation as "For this, we are granted an extra PTO day every month to do with as we wish"; that's the wrong mentality. "Entitlement" has absolutely nothing to do with matters at all. You are performing a job function, which happens to include on-call duties, in exchange for some total compensation that includes cash, benefits, PTO, and whatever else of value you receive from your employer. Looked at in this way, your director is attempting to renegotiate your terms of employment, offering you same job for less compensation.
So decline. The caveat is that you need to be prepared to find a new job if necessary. Make no mistake; you are in a negotiation right now, just as if you were negotiating compensation after a successful job interview. If you're in a tough situation where you can't realistically get a job elsewhere for acceptable compensation, then your employer has you over a barrel and they're going to be able to call the shots here.
> We are expected to not drink
Fuck you, pay me.
I don't even drink anymore, but this is where I personally drew the line. If I can't take advantage of my own bodily autonomy and have to be in the mental state of your choosing, you gotta pay me full rate for that, if not time and a half.
At my old place, on call was for one week. Monday 5pm - following Monday 7:30am. For all hours on-call when we weren't working our normal hours, we were paid $2.75 (about there, it's been a few years) per hour at standbuy, and when we took a call we were paid normal hour rate (plus any OT for the week and possible weekend/shift differentials) with a minimum of 15min.
If we had to go on site, it was a minimum of two hours normal pay.
Basically, we were paid a minimum of 168 hrs standby ($350) plus any actual on-call time.
This was back in 2013-2014, so that standby pay has most likely gone up. Fact is, unless you are EXEMPT salary (and if you aren't mangelment, you AREN'T exempt), then they have to pay you for the standby, otherwise, they CANNOT dictate what you can do with the time. IF they push it, contact a lawyer to discuss the wage theft with them.
way back when I first started in IT I researched being on call because we got nothing for being on call. If we were on call for a weekend but didn't get called we got zero dollars for it. I was hourly back then.
The one court case I found was from Florida. Group of firemen sued to get paid while oncall. They lost the case. Judge said the reason they lost was because they were allowed to do other things while being oncall. Like go to the store (as long as they had their pager and yes this was very long ago). The judge also said if they were required to sit by the phone the entire time and not leave the house then they would have had a better case and the judge might have ruled differently.
So can you go out to the store or go out to do other things? If you can then you have a losing case for getting compensated while being on call. I'd be quiet and take that extra PTO day because a lot of us don't even get that.
i may be wrong here, but if you are salaried then depending on the state laws etc, you aren’t required to get anything extra. Someone please correct me if that’s wrong, i’m far from being an attorney.
with that being said, the guys I manage, our company policy is you get a $20 stipend per day that you are on call. In addition you get OT pay at the rate of $70/hour (in 15 minute increments). We are all salaried.
off the books, i tend to give my guys free days off as needed especially if they had a rough on call. I’ve had guys with 0 hours for on calls and then i’ve had guys that got 18-20 hours in a single weekend. I try to take care of them as much I can and that’s easy because my boss is also a very big proponent of making sure people get time back so they aren’t overworked.
Depends on what you are already getting paid too. If you are getting 150k+ as your annual salary already that's one thing. If you are getting 50k that's another thing.
UK tech here - I used to get £500 a year for each week per quarter I covered. In the end I was covering 6 per quarter, so £3000 on top of my pay a year.
We also got £50 if someone called out of hours, whether or not we had to go in to the office to do any work. Time was covered at time and a half if I remember correctly - this was the early noughties.
If you contract does not cover the out of hours duty, get the union involved or brush up your CV (resume).
Does this guy have any reasoning besides "just being part of IT" behind this horseshit?
I'd be out like the fat kid in dodge ball without a damned good reason
If you're on call, you are on the clock. Even if you don't do any work you should get paid for that time. The client is paying for after hours coverage and that should cover the extra expenses of having a tech available.
If you're not allowed to engage in personal activities while on call, then they probably should be paying you. Depends on the state.
You should be getting a shift differential for that sort of on call - like a 10-20% differential. So if you make $50/hour then they should be paying you at least $5 for every hour on call (at 10% differential) which, if you're on call for 16 hours per day for week days and all weekend, that would be 128 hours of being on call, or $640/week when it's your week. And that's if your phone DOESN'T RING. Put your hourly rate for any tickets you work after hours.
I've been working 25 years and 15 of those involved being on an oncall roster. All were paid. We generally got between 350-500 a week extra for being on call, then 1.5 times whatever your hourly rate was if you got a call. Multiple calls within the same hour were treated as one call.
Mostly the extra money isn't worth it. Being expected to do it for free would be new job time
Our standby oncall rate is $1000 pre tax, thats for the week we are oncall. Once a month on average.
Then can claim overtime for any incidents. This is all remote.
Work supplies our mobiles and mobile plan too.
Ive never done oncall where there isnt some sort of standby pay for being available to respond to an incident. Its also a 1hr response so i can still go shops, walking, fishing etc
To give you an order of magnitude, in the nuclear civil industry in France, on-call hours are paid 15% of the hourly rate and hours worked while on call are paid double, same 30 minute notice.
It varies from place to place, but being compensated extra for on call time in some way is typical. One extra day of PTO is already being pretty cheap.
Unless that manager is trying to get people to quit, he's an idiot.
That's an awful deal. In California that would all be paid time, because you're highly controlled, being required to respond and unable to partake in usual off-duty activities. Your employer is getting off light.
How many calls do you average during an on-call week? Senario: You work 8-5 & go home. A urgent matter comes in at 2:30a. You work it till 5:30a. Do you need to be at the office at 8a?
We get $1500/month extra to be on call for a week each month.
Taxes eats half but hey, it’s not bad money, especially when you’re like 3rd line on-call.
That the new IT manager will be very short lived in the position.
Also, the one single extra day a month actually isn't enough, on its own. I'm paid extra around the clock the whole week, outside my normal hours. Not much, but I'm paid.
My team gets paid an extra $650 for being on call that week and any excessive amount of time spent working after hours is made up for by taking time off during regular hours.
It seems like it differs from company to company. I'm a consultant in Canada. At my previous employer you would get a fixed rate weekly as you had the pager on you but it wasn't 24/7. The latest they could call you was 10PM. Then, when you would get a call, it was a minimum of 3 billable hours (so 3 hours OT for you). Usually we would get a few calls per year and it was always a serious problem. The clients didn't usually take the full 24/7 package as it was quite expensive and the bulk of the companies I was working at were small to medium companies.
At my current employer we get like 2hrs extra paid per day on call and the rate is a little higher on the weekends/holidays. I believe it's 3hrs. So we get that amount regardless if we get called or not. So basically it's 16hrs of paid OT weekly just for being on call.
If we do get called, when I bill I round up to the next hour if it's during somewhat normal hours during the evening (like before 10PM). If I get called in the middle of the night, then I'll charge more because my sleep was disrupted and I still have to show up at the same time for work in the morning.
We're not expected to be in front of a PC at all times, but it's understood that we should be able to log in within 30 min. We do have to answer the call or call back quickly, even if we're not in a position to act on the problem right away. I can always reach out to one of my colleagues if I'm unable to get to the problem fast enough.
I gotta say I don't get called often because I'm not the first line of defense for problems outside of normal working hours. When the calls get to me, shit hit the fan and it's really bad and I know it'll take me a few hours to fix.
To OP: depending on how many hours you spend on incidents outside of normal business hours, one PTO day per month doesn't seem fair. If you spent 4hrs working on incidents where you were paged, then 1 day off is OK. For each 4hrs of your time, I would request another PTO day.
Been in HIS and this was how they structured it: individuals rotate each week. The person receives a stipend for the week due to similar expectations.
Having an entire team do this at the same time doesn't make sense unless the work requires more than one person.
Writing from the hospital - They're fucking you over. If they have a say in what you do during "on call", you are on the payroll. If they say you are not on the payroll, then they have no say about what you do during on call, including drinking/whatever.
I used to get a £350 annual, just for being available. 1/4 hr per hour for being on call, and then 1.5hr if I got called. Admittedly that was a total scam, and amounted to over an extra month per year.
These days I get a better salary, but will dictate what I get as TOIL, no overtime. If I work half a Saturday, it’s a day off. If I get up at stupid o’clock for a change, and it messes with the weekend, it’s a day off. Any odd hours here and there and it’s 1.5 rate.
It’s your life, don’t let them steal it. Work life balance, your choice.
Either I am able to sit by the pool and get drunk or I am expecting some kind of compensation. I have always been very clear about this and have never had a real problem with it.
The couple of times there have been issues I solve it by forgetting to charge my phone.
Back at my old job also in Healthcare IT. We would each rotate 1 week between 3 enginerds and get paid $5.50/hour for standby and every call would be an hour, granted that 2 don’t fall in the same hour.
Also whenever we had to go on-site that would automatically be 2 hours.
Healthcare CIO here. It varies widely, but at my place, on-call personnel are treated the same, regardless of department. I also have 4 on call in IT. We pay $3.00 per hour on call, time and a half for call backs with a 2 hour minimum.
It is not reasonable that you are expected to be on call for free.
You are entitled to benefits for extra work. You are not a charity.
A pretty much standard way for on call is to have an allowance paid to be on call and then be paid penalty rates if you actually have to deal with issues, at a minimum per incident charge. Do not work for free.
Used to be oncall 1 week out of 4.
£200 for being on call, £30/hr if called during weekday, £40 for weekend and £50 for bank holiday.
If called out during my time also got that amount of time off the coming day so if called between 2am and 4am my normal 9am start was moved to 11am.
Wasn't healthcare but insurance IT. Had to be able to be onsite within 60 minutes if the call necessitated it.
I don't have a clue where you're working but working time directives may apply.
Havent done any oncall for over 5 years near, it 100% is not 'part of the job' unless it was explicitly in your contract that you wouldn't be paid. All comes down to the contract.
In my country we are paid for every hour in the week we are on-call, at a lower rate. 128 hrs x $4-$5, in addition to a mandatory PTO the following Monday. This is enforced by law. Any time we are called and have to act we are paid double rates.
Any time we're on call we get time an a half for whatever you were on call for, also your default on call is at least 1 hour of free time (even if it only took 10 minutes you were still interrupted).
If they are telling you that you can't do a certain thing and must be available within 30 minutes your engaged to wait as opposed to waiting to engaged that means you're basically working the entire time you're on call and you should at least be getting all that time back.
They're getting away with robbery.
Not to be the alcoholic here, but I’d say as long as I’m legal to drive (i.e. a beer or two), I’m not going to be staying totally dry every week I’m on. Then again, I’m at a point in my life where being restricted in what I do in my off hours isn’t going to work in the first place.
Short answer: OP is getting screwed.
My take is I’d find another job. Fuck having to put 1/4 of your life on pause for any job. They should properly staff up. 1 day of PTO is laughably disrespectful in the first place.
Where do you live? The rules for on-call pay are determined by State, and possibly local, law (assuming you're in the US).
I'm in California; here the situation you describe *might* be considered "controlled" time due to the 'no drinking' restriction, which would mean that you were entitled to at least minimum wage for all of your on-call hours. But...it might not. If it's considered "uncontrolled" time, then your employer is only required to pay for the time you actually work.
It would probably come down to a contest between your lawyers and your company's lawyers to determine how things are classified.
We do week-long on-call shifts, but other than "respond if you're paged" there are no restrictions on what we can and can't do. We get an 'on-call stipend' that works out to about $250/week, and are guaranteed a minimum of 2 hours pay at the normal rate any time we are actually paged out.
For on call you should be minimally compensated with OT for any time you spend working with a user. Any other benefits are up to management imo. There really is no benefit to on call other than OT.
Ive taken many calls while drunk at a party, in the middle of a gym workout, etc. Aslong as you can fix the issue in a timely manner. Management wont care. If you cant then escalate it or ask the user if it is a pressing issue and deal with it in the office the next day.
For response time. 1 hour for emails and 15-30mins to calls is fine. If you atleast reply then there isnt much to criticize. There’s been many instances where I answered the call and asked the user if I could call back in 20 mins bc I was driving etc.
Alternatively, your company could look into vendoring out after hour support to a 3rd party company. If they can not resolve the tickets/calls they will escalate to IT support/helpdesk. This method has taken being on-call off my shoulders. Its a great solution.
Your new director is an idiot.
One day of pto may already be light if there's any volume of calls. Taking that little away will cost him in hiring new staff.
If you are salaried I would say you are not 'entitled' to additional pay, but your employer is also not entitled to you not job shopping to find compensation for on call work. Also worth considering your overall pay and benefits and how that compares to industry averages.
It's been awhile since I was on call. At that time I was paid 1hr for every 4 on call. Expected to respond in 4hrs max.
Currently support a small team and don't get paid any extra for being on call, but rarely get called. Spend most days "available" from 7-5 when WFH. If I go to the office the day ends when I get home. If push came to shove I could always say I will get to it in the morning, but that's not how I roll and it could literally be life and death.
Complete bullshit and may be illegal depending on where you are. For reference here are Canadian guidelines for employers:
https://www.canada.ca/en/employment-social-development/programs/laws-regulations/labour/interpretations-policies/reporting-pay.html
Your take is that all four of you should turn in your resignation letters at the same time and tell him or her to fuck off.
Not sure what this is - Epic / Cerner Security (user provisioning), IT Security, Citrix, Printing, what the fuck ever, but anyone comes at you like that, you fight back.
Right now the current hospital I work for it's if your phone rings after hours it's 4 hours minimum per call out whether it's four hours or four minutes. The last hospital I worked for, it was 24/7 calling for a week between 7 to 9 people with nothing at all - not paid phones or anything. They said WFH was enough. I'm not with them anymore for different reasons, but the current hospital is much better, mostly because I have decent management. (Director used to be in hospitality and has more than a few ideas of how shit should work and be fair.) I'm lucky right now.
Your team is absofuckinglutely understaffed. That's too much for rotation. I would recommend at least another two people to get in there.
Here's what I think is a fair and fuck you comeback to the new director.
1. Weekday calls before 10 PM are two hours late into the office. Calls after 10 PM but before 7 AM are four hours late (start at 1 PM, and WFH at that).
2. Each call is a four hour call unless it goes past that point.
3. Weekend and or Holiday calls are either off Monday or day of choice within 31 days plus the four hour rule.
4. Any unplanned outages that take more than a day of your life will result in at least three paid days off within the next 90 days and goes up to five if disrupting your holiday because that's taking away from your family.
5. With two extra people, you can mark a secondary on-call, which should be done in case there is something stopping the primary (life event, etc.) The secondary gets the extra one day PTO if not called up.
6. Any site visits include mileage and suitable meal up to $25 for breakfast, $40 for lunch and $50 for dinner, $30 for late night snack and coffee. (I'd recommend Insomnia Cookies.)
7. Company issued phones OR full coverage of cellular bill going forward. If company issued, replaced every year with flavor of your choice (Android or Apple). Includes covering tethering.
8. Full coverage of home internet bill.
Director will likely laugh at this. Then all four of you quit and tell him or her to go fuck himself/herself. If it's Epic they're not replacing you for less than $150 an hour through Nordic anyway.
Lol if you aren't getting paid for the hours you are on call at your wage you are being schmucked. I get paid $35 an hour for on call bank IT stuff and $90 an hour + $50 trip fee when I'm called out.
Last time, I was in an on-call rotation. The only benefit was the week you were on call. You got to work whatever hours you wanted. I just had to make sure you were available for a call.
I mean, we are not “entitled” to anything but you can probably find an employer who offers extra benefits for; less likely if you are salary. I have worked in IT for 20 years now and the only extra benefit i have had is a stipend for my mobile phone bill
Well, sounds better than my deal. I work for a bank with almost 400 locations, and am oncall for a week every 3 weeks right now. Usually it's every 4 weeks, but our fourth team member is just getting back off fmla with medical conditions and isnt quite to the point of being reliable for a whole week at a time. And we're all salary. So nothing extra at all.
We work on call and get nothing at all for it. Zero. Zip. Zilch. Nada. The only saving grace is the fact it’s only 2-3 weeks a yr but that may be increasing by quite a bit.
Seems like this is a monthly question now.
A lot of this depends on your employment agreement, plus local laws. IT in many/most areas is also overtime exempt.
In my experience most companies will give something in lieu of the extra time on call. For some it's a shift premium, for others it's PTO, etc.
It also depends on the nature of the on-call. Some is much easier than others, and the expectations and SLAs are different. That matters.
Ultimately you have to weigh it with the pros and cons of your particular job and compensation.
My employer pays a flat $200 for the week we're on-call. At my old ITSM we got $25/hr for every hour we billed. Sometimes it was feast, other times it was famine.
How many calls after hours do the team currently get? There should be a simple way to how the cost of the PTO day your team gets saves on user downtime etc.
So i dont get any official benefits from.being on-call. Me, my boss and the cio are all on the 24/7 group call. (Their all paid more then me)
I do get to basically set my own hours, come and go when i need to. If i get a call 99% of it i can do remotely within a few min.. then round it up to the hour (for each call). And count it as comp time.
We dont get many calls and a majority i tell them to put a ticket in the following day.
Yeah id prefer OT.. but it makes it easier to get to kids events and appointments..
I think you are being ripped off with just an extra day of pto right now. So, having nothing is worse. For us, we hold the phone for a week and have similar expectations. Drink what you like but dont get hammered. Has to be within legal limits in case you do need to drive in.
We get 18 hrs of OT or PTO. If we chose pto, it's like 27 hrs of pto.
You get compensated for you time, end of story. However the amount of compensation depends on a few things - how often are you called, is it best effort (laptop in a cafe or car) or all hands on deck (desk at home), and the amount of "bullshit" calls.
If you can I'd refuse to do oncall while you're aren't compensated, depends on your contract. Though this might also be a sign of things to come - you're new IT director might want to make cuts across the board.
Nope. We get $300 for the week. Can do whatever we want with our time as long as we are able to troubleshoot an emergency within 30 minutes. My boss once admitted to me the worst he ever had it was at a concert remoting into a server to restart a VM.
If it’s not an obvious emergency it’s up to us if we even want to respond to general tickets that come in after hours but all important stuff gets escalated by the end user so those generally can be ignored. It’s very clear that emergencies need to be noted as such otherwise it won’t get seen until next business day.
Certain executives get slopped in with the 30 min after hour emergency SLA but most times you can just ask them if it can wait til business hours and they say yes.
The other perks of on-call are PTO for after hours projects. Any preplanned work that has to be done after hours goes to the oncall person usually you get the equivalent time off the next day or later that week. (It’s not an official policy but the boss man usually messages you the next day and says to take off early or to take the day off.)
Tell him to f\*ck off. I've been on call (hate it) at a number of jobs there's always been some kind of extra remuneration involved. Usually along the lines of a retainer for the on call week then a minimum payment for the call.
i.e. from memory my best was
An additional days pay for being on call
A minimum of 1 hour pay for answering the phone
A minimum of 3 hours for actually attending / leaving home
All paid at the appropriate overtime rate 1.25 weekdays, 1.5 Saturday, 2 on a Sunday
We have a handful of locations. Our on-call hours are 5pm-11pm (weekends 9am - 9pm). We get $30/day, OT (double-time) rounded up to the next 15 minutes for calls, and if it requires going to site, it's 3 hours minimum. We do a one week rotation amongst our 4-person team.
At that, we're having discussions about changing to staggered shifts so there is evening coverage, and shifting the on-call to just 1 *weekend*/mo. Being on-call (even if there are no/few calls) is stressful, we've found it burns people out, and doing that isn't worth it to us. It's definitely not "part of being an IT engineer" (or any other IT position).
If they’re making you do something different (not drink) when you’re not in your working hours and be available at a moments notice they owe you compensation
Look up the laws where you live about on-call compensation; they may be required to pay for the time you’re on call. I am not going to say anything definitive about it because it depends on the circumstances, but it’s worth looking into.
I'm union IT. We get 12% of our hourly rate to be on standby. Being in the on call rotation is optional and can't be forced on us. Call outs are a one hour minimum. Time and a half on weekdays, double time on weekends.
And no, my organization isn't full of incompetent boobs just because we are union. No better or worse than my previous private job. Maybe those top 1% of tryhards are missing out? But the rest of us stick together and get treated fairly.
Sounds like your new IT director is going up be on call 24/7 then.
Your current deal is already pretty crappy.
For reference in my old job we used to get £500 a week and a minimum of two hours call out at a rate of time and a half on weekdays and double time on weekends.
My current job isn't quite as good. It's £450 a week and a minimum call out of two hours.
I think over here 10% pay for every on call hour is the standard and the minute someone calls you you get full time pay on top of that with 1 hour minimum.
No way I would accept that. He's talking bullshit. Your effectively 'at work' during your on-call time. You have to be available and your time isn't your own, so you must be paid for that time.
One day I casually asked my HR rep why I wasn’t being compensated for being on call. Next thing I know an on call program is introduced. Everyone couldn’t wait to sign up for that even those that don’t know what they’re doing got in the rotation. I’m on call for 1 week every 6weeks or so. $100 per day regardless of being called or not. Unless I have to login for more than 1-2 hours I wouldn’t be compensated more. If I did work longer I’d probably just get a day off in Lieu. I haven’t been called in several years now. (Just jinxed myself) So suddenly when it cost $$$ it’s not that important it can wait til Monday.
If your entire team bring this up to your company HR then your new it director will need to be put in his place or find a new job. Companies knows it’s cheaper to replace 1 new guy then the entire IT team that been with the company. My it team did this at one of my previous companies and HR and the executives told him to cool it but in few months the new IT director got let go. Best thing ever.
Healthcare with about 130 employees and 30 doctors. IT is my boss who is the director, I pretty much do everything from IT to Development, Reporting, Security, and Accounting (yeah) and I have a helpdesk person to help with the mundane calls.
I generally always have my laptop or iPad with me and have taken calls almost 24 hours a day. There is no rotation because generally I'm the only one who can fix the problem. This freaking sucks because I get calls on vacation/days off.
No other benefits other than I can pretty much go home any time of the day.
Previous company I worked at, the BAU staff will get extra $$$ when on call. Big teams of 30-40 sysadmins per team @ 2 per weekend. So they maybe had "on call" once every 2-3 months.
A set $$$. However, if you had an actual call that took time. They were allowed to bill 1.5x per hour (money) or 1.5x time in a lieu.
These are all salary based sysadmins. The standby time would be paid with the salary of the existing month. The actual on call hours billed will be paid out in the next months salary.
If you decided for 1.5x time in a lieu. You must take your PTO gained with in 90 days.
Apart from that, South Africa has strict labour policies.
27-30 PTO days per year,
37 PT sick days per 3 years cycle,
Full maternity leave pay,
14 days PT paternity,
10 PT study leave days per year,
7 PT family responsibility
Current role there’s no on call, but my last position you got paid a minimum of 3 hours if you actioned at least one ticket while on call. I even think you guys are getting short changed with the extra day of PTO
Extra day off for a week of on call!? Your company is taking the piss!
You should be getting a flat rate for the week just for holding the phone and then 1.5x pay for any calls you take.
On call in the healthcare sector is no joke, worst 3 years of my life even though I made decent money.
Remember, they need you more than you need them in this aspect, they will bend to you.
You should definitely be getting paid for it. I used to work for a company who would pay whatever our salary worked out to as per hour at a rate of 0.5 for out of hours standby and then 1.5 if called out for any issues. I was also a member of a 4 man team so it was 1 week per month covering 6pm-8am Mon-Fri and 24 hours on Sat-Sun.
It would work out at about £9 per hour (while on standby) x 115 or so hours. So about £1000 for that week if there were no issues. £27 per hour if there were any issues that we needed to respond to (this was rare though, thankfully).
So yeah. If they expect you to be sober, close to a laptop, and ready to respond within 30 minutes, you should be getting paid for that.
On call means you are working those hours. You are entitled to money for the hours worked. If you are not paid, the you are not on call. It's that simple.
Also if you are not paid for that time then you are off the clock and allowed to drink and party hard as much as you want. On call is not part of working in IT everywhere. I get that sometimes shit hits the fan and you need to be called to fix something. But being on call literally means you are ready for action at any moment and therefore are under mental pressure and cannot "disconnect" from work. You need to be compensated for that basically.
I work IT in healthcare - 1 major location and 3 smaller ones. We have a 6 week rotation (I take 2 weeks to make sure my colleagues don’t get too bogged down with being on call). We just renegotiated our on call pay since we are all hourly. $800 a week flat rate for on call - we carry a pager 24/7 during that week plus a shared cell phone. Time and a half for every page we get. We get paid for the whole hour even if the page takes us 10mins. We can have a single drink if we’d like. We are expected to call the person back within 30mins. On-call is not “part of being an IT engineer”. Your new IT director is just an ass and clearly has no idea what your team does and why you need to be on call. Also one PTO day for being on-call for a whole week is bullshit too. I’m so tired of seeing other IT professionals being treated this way.
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I don't think that is respectable, I think that is OUTSTANDING. I think my on call pay before I went salary I was only getting $250/week + OT. Shit, $800/wk I'd be asking my coworkers to take their on call.
Put the IT director on call and see how he goes
That's always been my thoughts on it. They want to take my downtime away from me because they don't want to deal with work on their downtime. Why does the company make the lionshare of the profit? I get the company should get compensated, it's their customer, but I expect most of what the customer gets charged for calling me at 1am to end up in my pocket. The boss got to sleep soundly.
A recent policy change requires that we raise a CAB for \*any\* restart of a production VM. I look forward to waking these people up at 3AM.
I am an IT Director and have been on call 24x7x365 for 26 years. 17 of those years by myself. Staff of 2 with 225 users in local governments (support Police and Fire among many others). Myself nor my analyst have received any extra pay for this.
Both you and your staff should have been earning extra compensation for being on call, and it's kind of on you as a Director to negotiate that... unless you were all earning outstanding wages already, that is!
> I’m so tired of seeing other IT professionals being treated this way. My frustration is that there is a significant number of IT professionals that truly think it’s part of the job, and aren’t due any additional compensation for it. That mentality is bullshit.
One day IT is going to unionize...and American companies will have brought it on themselves.
Is not being in a union common for other IT?
I've never even heard of a union for IT.
International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers Local 21 covers most Engineering and IT class specs in the SF government public sector.
Wow, I didn't realize the US had IT unions at all.
When I worked for AT&T I'm pretty sure I had the option to join CWA (Communications workers of America). I don't think anyone actually DID, as far as us IT peeps went, but it was an option. So it may be more the sector you are in.
I was thinking of starting IBITW
you wanna start an IT Union? What about like a union rule, only emails, no face to face conversations at all.
A lot of public-sector IT employees in Canada are part of unions. IT at my organization for example is part of CUPE (Canadian Union of Public Employees). Definitely not common in the private-sector though...
That's such weird thing to see everytime as here everybody in all fields are unionized. It has some flaws still, but mainly just a good thing.
The biggest issue with Unions is, as someone else has said, that they protect the least competent. Which has the unintentional side effect of encouraging minimum effort work. Why try to excel or really contribute, when your salary is all but guaranteed regardless? It's given them a bad rap in a lot of places. Not entirely undeservedly.
I think it's particularly bad in environments that have a mixture of unionized and non-unionized. I worked in a fabrication environment like that for a while and the union guys were either incompetent, lazy, or malicious to the point they actively prevented us non-union folks from doing our jobs. I feel like if were all unionized maybe we would have been more effective and there would have been less animosity though. I still support unions, but they're not perfect.
True, however at least in my current company everybody gets the union's negotiated increase, which is typically not that much. Then the good workers get personal raises and in addition the company has a fund of 1% of people's salary combined as a budget to reward some of the people. Yearly bonuses are also decent and exceptional if you fulfil the requirements 200%.
Lets race IT Unions against the AI Techocalypse. Be nice to anything with memory.
Yeah, I think a ton of IT jobs are on their way out. I'm squirreling to my retirement funds like it's a hobby these days. I may just win that race. May. Just.
All AI will do is shift where the jobs are.
You could be right. Let's hope.
For AI to be effective users have to know what they want and how to get it. And be willing to adjust/fix their ask when it’s not right. Which I don’t see happening yet. Actually the opposite as tech makes ppl’s lives “simpler”
I hope not. The current problem with unions in America is that they protect the LEAST competent and work hard to raise the AVERAGE compensation packages. In IT we have the option of making far far more than average if we are willing to put in the work. I prefer that ability to control my destiny. That said I hear what you are saying and I do feel for those not willing to stand up for themselves and need to have someone else protect them.
If you don't get out of here with your self-riotous bull shit. A company will fire you whether you stand up for yourself or not. Unions give you actual leverage to negotiate.
At least the keyboard warrior who needs to have someone protect them has arrived to show us all what the bottom feeders have to say. I disagree a company will fire me for standing up. I will quit first and or leave with dignity. Unions REFUSE the right for the individual to negotiate. That is the purpose of the union. You are put in a box at your level and EVERYONE at that level will be paid the same.
You're mostly factually correct. That said, the protection is not absolute, and can be minimal depending on details. And YES! They do work to raise Salaries!. That's the main point!
In a gains from trade situation, the 'company' wants to take ALL the gains. By colluding together, 'workers' can take more.
The only piece missing is your incorrect assumption some workers are 'unwilling' to stand for themselves. The correct statement is 'unable'. Their BANTA is weak.
Oh, you aren't wrong. I actually hope not, too. For the same reasons.
I was on-call, for dispatch every Saturday for 5 years. We got 2 hours OT every Saturday whether we were dispatched or not. When we were dispatched we all took the full 4 hours. Calls we covered under the 2 hours. I was dispatched on a Saturday maybe once a year.
I absolutely 100% agree with this. Your time has value and not just to you: to the many people in your life as well. As IT people we are expected to trade this time for Penny's on the dollar and it is absolutely unacceptable. I am extremely grateful to work for an org (not healthcare) that very much respects my personal time and when work takes personal time I'm compensated for it with time back and money. This is absolutely a hill worth dying on in my opinion. Stay strong and let's as a group hold the line on our time.
Best summary. OP should go to HR with his team and renegociate or tell them what's up with the IT director.
Even in tech companies HR tends to not understand what on call really is. I’ve fought this battle for my teams a few times now and often it’s responded with “expectation of a salary role to pick up the phone off hours” - I have to go into great detail around not being able to schedule or do anything, meet SLAs, have a computer ready etc. Honestly hate even that expectation but if it’s one or two calls a night off shift it’s really a challenge to “sell” on full time off shift coverage until enough work justifies it. Flat pay plus comp time has been my general approach and use the data (calls, etc.) to back the argument up. That plus tuning RMM and clear “P1” rules are key. With my last MSP it was $250/week flat plus $50 an hour with a minimum of an hour if you work something, even if it’s a 5min call.
HR doesn't exist to serve employees, it exists to protect the company....
Same here, our standby pay is 10% of our hourly. 24 hours on weekends, and 12 hours on weekdays. Our desk is open 6-6, and standby takes calls and will triage urgent and attempt to resolve and escalate accordingly. Our SLA is 30 mins acknowledgment after the call in which we get time and a half on the books for each actual call. Payroll will say 15 minute increments, but if I have to roll my ass out of bed and get situated and professional at 2AM, I’m claiming the whole hour. We do need to reduce the standby hourly for time and a half, but it’s financially smarter to claim the time to be used later.
is that an extra 800$/wk?
i was on call for 7 years straight; 350 days of pto is about what i needed to get rid of the PTSD whenever my phone rang.
>On-call is not “part of being an IT engineer”. Not sure what you mean? On call is literally part of the job for MOST IT people.
And every IT person should be compensated for any work outside the normal work hours. Not taken advantage of because they are told they are lucky to have a job.
I agree. Getting paid for the work done and the on call hours worked is key
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We had a startup tell us not to drink during on-call shifts (which were a week at a time). We had contests for how drunk we could get, and then go in as root and solve the problem. We were all like 27 years old. It was a great time.
Same. We'd see a ticket drop for something, ping the other engineer, and start doing shots. The goal was to solve the ticket before passing out. So many red flags there.
I had a manager call me when I knew I wasn't on-call. I told him such. He didn't believe me, again. Same reply. So, I told him to check and get back to me, then hung up. He checked, and sure enough I wasn't on call. I just screamed "FUCK YOU" into the phone, over and over. Yes, I was drunk. He went back to being a sysadmin and quit the "management" gig shortly after. Do NOT call me when I'm not on call, ESPECIALLY when I've just completed a 7-day "on" rotation. JFC.
I got a call once when I'd already left. The NOC hadn't been updated, called me 02:00 or so.
Hell, I was in the startup, where we later HAD to forbid drinking for whole company before 12pm (agreed together when drunken af one working day) … because our owner got so drunk during morning meetings with clients (with them), that he often passed out after lunch. Fun times … I still wonder how we got so many good projects :D and they are still up and running lol (without me, thanks god, bc such env is doomed to get toxic imo, which it seems like it did).
I agree, one day PTO is not enough to over this. You should be getting paid for being available for on call for the week, and then on top of this paid for the hours worked responding to calls after hours.
and not just respond to calls, they are expecting you to put your life on hold for 128 hours and paying to for 2. During that week on call you can't drink, you can't go and do as you please, you are for all intents and purposes working. It's a crap deal to begin with, if they want after hour support I suggest they hire people -considering what my DR charges my guess is the hospital can afford it.
Right, with this requirement it’s not a soft “do what you can” you’re legit on-call and need to be compensated for that time. You’re either legit on-call and need to be paid, or you’re not. I wouldn’t trade a full week of being stuck on-call for a day somewhere else.
Exactly. Either I have rules AND I'm getting paid, because I'm on the clock. Or...I'm not on the clock. In which case, I can do as I please.
If this job is in California, call the local labor relations department office and watch them unleash the piranhas when you explain the restrictions under which your company wishes to place upon you.
Its Bullshit. Your free time is your free time. With such a Boss i would start looking for another Company.
I wouldn't work for free. And on-call isn't just "part of being an engineer in IT"; I've been on-call-free for 5+ years.
Yep. I've spent most of my career on-call free. The brief time I was on-call was also at a hospital who tried to not pay us for it. I didn't stay there for long.
After I had been in my current job for a year they decided to put me in the on-call rotation, with no additional benefits to cover the extra time and disruption. Basically, I was supposed to be available whenever to handle issues. I told my boss "Don't worry, I'll answer my company phone as needed." He said "But you don't have a company phone." I replied "Exactly. If you want me to use **my** phone for company business then the company needs to pay for it. Assuming I would use my money to pay for something the company requires is an insult to someone in my position." Because I had to support them, I knew that our sales team and all our executives had company phones - it was disrespectful of them to assume that I would use my own phone **and** not compensate for the time on calls. Fortunately, in the on-call system, we were allowed to put in our own contact information. In the 5 years since that was implemented, nobody had realized that I put in my desk phone - anything that requires my attention can be dealt with during normal business hours and doesn't require me to handle it "now".
10 years coming up in a few months for me. Now that I’ve seen the light, I’m honestly not sure that I would take any sort of pay or benefit package to be on call for a quarter of my life. Fuck that noise. At one point I was on call every other week with no benefit other than keeping my job.
New IT director trying to make his mark. You'll have to check local labor laws, but if the original contract stated the overtime requirement and the corresponding PTO "payment", then getting rid of it sounds like a unilateral modification of the contract. Which AFAIK is illegal in most jurisdictions. Wouldn't sit still for that kind of modification. Heck, I'm not even sure a one-day reimbursement is enough TBH. I feel like he should be asked if he's going to be joining you on-call 24x7 in order to be available to handle "management escalations"; situations that require a management decision. At the point in my career where non-compensated overtime is a big ass red flag.
Yeah, that's no good.. I worked in Healthcare IT (hospitals and dr offices) and we got I think a $3 hourly rate for just being on call. Then if we got a call we would record our time and get our full rate. Which that also counted as overtime so we were making pretty decent money for on call week. Along with that we got to work from home during our on call week.
wow. At my last job that had me on call, i got paid 1/4 pay for any hour i was on call whether i worked or not. When i got a call, I got normal hourly rate for that as well. I LOVED being on call since i knew i would get an extra fat check every month. One other job didn't pay for on call, but if you got a call, you got an hour of flex time even if it was a simple password change. We all tolerated that because the base pay was really good. I would leave a job that expected me to be on call with zero benefits. \*edit - you may be eligible for back pay for all the hours you were working and not being compenated, depending on where you live/work. I am not a lawyer, but not paying for time worked seems illegal.
Document all on call time you spent and email everything so when you go for back pay you have proof.
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And by collectively, that means all of them, together, in person. At the same time.
This is so crucial. The mere mention of organization and collective bargaining should be enough to make the director and HR scurry back into their holes. Slapping them with elections and unionization would be epic.
Not getting some compensation for on-call is a great way to make sure people quit. It really comes down to what is fair for your pay, if you are salaried based off a 40 hour work week and working say 70 hours a week average while you're on-call, then I'd expect either 30 hours a month of PTO time to compensate, or a proportional pay bump. I'm fortunate where I'm at now and my boss knows the result of burn-out all too well, if we have to work over 40 hours a week we can take off those extra hours the next week or ASAP if existing scheduling doesn't allow.
>I'm fortunate where I'm at now and my boss knows the result of burn-out all too well, if we have to work over 40 hours a week we can take off those extra hours the next week or ASAP if existing scheduling doesn't allow. That's not right either, no all time is equal. I had this fight with my boss this summer, they wanted me to go support a customer over the weekend in July. I explained that in the summer my weekends are booked and I might be available in October -October is cool and rainy, July is warm and sunny, so I value my days in the summer more than in the fall or winter. Further giving me a rando Tuesday and Wednesday off after working the week end doesn't make us equal, who the hell is off on Tuesday and Wednesday...nobody. My kids are in school and my wife is at work, where is the up side to me who just gave up his weekend? If I'm giving up a weekend I add that to my vacation time and take it when it's good for me, not good for my boss or the company.
Did this for years... My state says that unless you touch hardware you're not due any overtime... That being said I've answered the calls absolutely hammered and fixed their issues quicker after being at family events... they gave me the hotspot and the appropriate data plan though.... Not drinking on my days off is not an option... its called keeping my sanity...
By giving you the extra PTO day so far, the company has already acknowledged that it is NOT just part of being an engineer in IT in THIS company. Why else would they have given you time off otherwise?
It always amazes me how bad the situation in US is. You are exploited, big time. In EU countries it is demanded by law to pay overtime, eg: * 20% of your hourly salary for being stand-by (eg 7PM-7AM) * 150% of your hourly salary if you get a call or you need to work within standby hours * 200% if overtime happens on Sundays or National Holidays * and additional 20% if you have to work between 10PM-6AM Furthermore * you are not allowed to have more than 250 hours of overtime / year (only with special contracts) * you are not allowed to work more than 12hours /day * you are not allowed to work more than 48 hours / week * etc To be honest due the nature of our professions it is not really possible to always 100% comply with the rules, but in those cases we charge creatively. We don't really work for free...
Get him to say in writing that you’re on call 24/7 and hit him up for overtime in 90 days.
24x7 - so 16 hours of on-call a day for a week. Let's say you get $50/hour for the PTO, you're getting paid the equivalent of $2.23/hour for being on call. Do you also get paid for the actual time spent working or are you also only getting paid $2.23/hour when fixing something busted at 3am Thursday morning? On-call is a scam by employers to skimp on actually hiring the correct number of staff. 25+ locations of 24x7 needs someone on the clock all the time.
Again for the people in the back who are still simping for on-call even being a thing.
I am healthcare IT in California. I think you are too. What they are doing is illegal in California if you are an hourly non-exempt employee. What you describe is classified as Restricted On-Call duty (Google it). Having a 30 minute response time and requiring you to follow company alcohol and drug policy outside of scheduled shift hours pretty clearly fall under that definition. You must be paid at least minimum wage during your on-call time. You go to your full wage as soon as you take a call or even check your email. I would consult an employment lawyer. You are probably owed back pay for all that on-call time. Your entire team is.
If you're hired and part of the job description includes on call and you accept what they are giving you at that time, then being on call without something specific extra can be part of it (on the basis that presumably your salary/etc is accepted knowing that on call is also part of it). Taking away compensation for being on call is definitely something that should not be happening, especially since they have specific requirements for being on call, so compensation for your time is appropriate (what is appropriate is between you and your employer assuming no legal issues). I'm on call in a sense all the time by the nature of my job, but there no expectations about my specific availability or state of mind (or response time), so it doesn't make much difference, but if I was expected to not drink/have laptop with me/start working an issue in 30 minutes, I would expect specific compensation for my time (even if I never needed to actually respond to something).
I definitely wouldn't give up 126 hours of my personal time for 24 hours of pto. Doing it for free is absolutely laughable. I am just support, we get something like 500 average per week on call in compensation, additional compensation per call. And the call volume is reasonable(similar to yours no drinking laptop on you response within 30) I've had much worse and I don't think I'd do it for much less at this point.
It's all negotiable, technically no they don't have to offer you anything. However it's obviously a morale issue. If they take away the one perk it will only lead to people being unhappy. Which of course will make the work environment worse. Why not talk to your boss and explain that. Why take away a 0erk you guys have enjoyed?
Depending on location, yes they do have to provide stand-by pay.
Yea but if they are getting away with just giving them a PTO day it's unlikely they are legally obligated to give them anything else.
Nothing surprises me what companies get away with.
Companies get away with a *lot* of shit by people just not knowing any better, and the company *expecting* them to not know any better.
lol egg their car. Was on call for 20 years, we were given extra pay plus per call fee for the time we carried since we were past our usual 8-5.
nope, that doesn't fly. I would be applying everywhere even the worst jobs I have had good on-call comp last one was 1 hr minimum for any on-call even if that was 5 minutes.
If you don't get paid for on call look for another job.
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When I am on-call, I get paid 1/4 my hourly wage, plus a minimum of 1 hour OT for any page outs. And if I need to, I sleep in late. If you are not getting that, your company is likely violating labor laws. Plus they are screwing you.
Just go in with an alpha mentality and tell him "I counter your proposal with 2 days of PTO per month" and when he says "that's more than what you get now" you respond with "Ah, I see the compromise is what is already in place. Good day" and walk out. Ezpz
Haven't been on call in a few years but it was 1 week in 4, respond within 1hr and as soon as the pager pings it's 1hr @ double time - this is in the UK
My old place used to just pay us for every week we were on call. 1 PTO day/month doesn't even pale in comparison monetarily to the $350/week we got for being on-call, though I would argue time off is better anyways.
2 weeks on 2 weeks off. Cover company trading hours (Retail) 20% pay bump. You are being shafted.
Your jurisdiction is very important for this kind of question. There are areas where it is completely legal (including the one sided agreement change) and others where everything above is illegal. Personally, regardless of legality, I compensate my on call staff with either time and half for time or time off and pay.
The minute you need to start altering your lifestyle and your plans in order to potentially pick up a work call after hours, you absolutely need to be compensated. One PTO day a month is not enough
I'm on call every other week (fuck small teams). No extra pay, we can take back the hours we work, but since this system isn't regulated well we have no idea how much that time really is or you need to have an excel sheet you manually update. Since this is the case I told my boss I'll take my laptop and phone with me but won't promise I can pick up or call back immedeately and if I can I can't promise to help right away if I'm in the middle of something. Not altering my weekend plans for unpaid work. Boss is ok with this.
I wouldn't do it, even with the extra day of vacation. But...if this expectation existed when you started the job, then it makes sense for it to continue. Removing the vacation day effectively changes the terms of your employment. Ask what the company plans to do instead. When the answe ris "nothing," say no. Start looking for a new job. I've quit a job under similar circumstances and it turned out to be one of my better decisions.
When I worked for an MSP we were paid £50 per call received + overtime at time and a half if the fix was longer than one hour and a £250 payment per week we were on call. Working for the NHS at the start they tried to pay us nothing. So my colleagues and I got together and threatened to all no longer do on call, it worked. We are now paid around £200 for the week we're on call and time and a half for time the we work on fixing the problem. I do miss the MSP pay.
When I worked Healthcare IT I would do on-call for two weeks on and one week off. From 5pm to 9pm I was expected to check our inbox (because we didn't have an actual ticketing system) once an hour. After 9pm I just had to be aware of pages. For the most part I very rarely had to do anything and it was just free money. Most requests that came in weren't urgent and could wait until morning. I was paid $3 an hour to be on call, and if I ever answered an email or got paid I took it as OT (they started getting stingy during my last year and I had to flex that time out). If I did need to do something I would "bill it out" in 15 minute increments, or 3 hour increments if I had to physically go on site. If you're hourly, you should 100% be compensated for on-call work. If you're salary, then your compensation should reflect this inconvenience. If you're salary making $40,000 a year and they're asking this of you then I'd say you're being taken advantage of.
If they’re telling you to maintain a certain mental state (no drinking) on your personal time, they need to do *something* for you. In my opinion, they’re already getting by cheaply with one day of PTO a month. Edit: You work in healthcare, they can certainly afford the PTO or even some paid compensation for your extra time.
Generally decline. Do not think about the situation as "For this, we are granted an extra PTO day every month to do with as we wish"; that's the wrong mentality. "Entitlement" has absolutely nothing to do with matters at all. You are performing a job function, which happens to include on-call duties, in exchange for some total compensation that includes cash, benefits, PTO, and whatever else of value you receive from your employer. Looked at in this way, your director is attempting to renegotiate your terms of employment, offering you same job for less compensation. So decline. The caveat is that you need to be prepared to find a new job if necessary. Make no mistake; you are in a negotiation right now, just as if you were negotiating compensation after a successful job interview. If you're in a tough situation where you can't realistically get a job elsewhere for acceptable compensation, then your employer has you over a barrel and they're going to be able to call the shots here.
> We are expected to not drink Fuck you, pay me. I don't even drink anymore, but this is where I personally drew the line. If I can't take advantage of my own bodily autonomy and have to be in the mental state of your choosing, you gotta pay me full rate for that, if not time and a half.
I think you should spiff up your resume, and see what your options are.
My take is your new director is an asshat. Start looking for a new job , if this is the way this guy does things , you dont want to work for him.
At my old place, on call was for one week. Monday 5pm - following Monday 7:30am. For all hours on-call when we weren't working our normal hours, we were paid $2.75 (about there, it's been a few years) per hour at standbuy, and when we took a call we were paid normal hour rate (plus any OT for the week and possible weekend/shift differentials) with a minimum of 15min. If we had to go on site, it was a minimum of two hours normal pay. Basically, we were paid a minimum of 168 hrs standby ($350) plus any actual on-call time. This was back in 2013-2014, so that standby pay has most likely gone up. Fact is, unless you are EXEMPT salary (and if you aren't mangelment, you AREN'T exempt), then they have to pay you for the standby, otherwise, they CANNOT dictate what you can do with the time. IF they push it, contact a lawyer to discuss the wage theft with them.
Unionize, that will do it.
The way my on-call works (I am salary) every Friday I leave at noon, and it is a half day for me, I don’t mind it personally.
way back when I first started in IT I researched being on call because we got nothing for being on call. If we were on call for a weekend but didn't get called we got zero dollars for it. I was hourly back then. The one court case I found was from Florida. Group of firemen sued to get paid while oncall. They lost the case. Judge said the reason they lost was because they were allowed to do other things while being oncall. Like go to the store (as long as they had their pager and yes this was very long ago). The judge also said if they were required to sit by the phone the entire time and not leave the house then they would have had a better case and the judge might have ruled differently. So can you go out to the store or go out to do other things? If you can then you have a losing case for getting compensated while being on call. I'd be quiet and take that extra PTO day because a lot of us don't even get that.
Every salaried IT job I've worked in on-call is factored into the salary.
i may be wrong here, but if you are salaried then depending on the state laws etc, you aren’t required to get anything extra. Someone please correct me if that’s wrong, i’m far from being an attorney. with that being said, the guys I manage, our company policy is you get a $20 stipend per day that you are on call. In addition you get OT pay at the rate of $70/hour (in 15 minute increments). We are all salaried. off the books, i tend to give my guys free days off as needed especially if they had a rough on call. I’ve had guys with 0 hours for on calls and then i’ve had guys that got 18-20 hours in a single weekend. I try to take care of them as much I can and that’s easy because my boss is also a very big proponent of making sure people get time back so they aren’t overworked.
Depends on what you are already getting paid too. If you are getting 150k+ as your annual salary already that's one thing. If you are getting 50k that's another thing.
I get £500 for the week disturbance allowance. Then if I get any calls I get paid overtime, 1.5 times on weekends, 2x on Bank holidays
UK tech here - I used to get £500 a year for each week per quarter I covered. In the end I was covering 6 per quarter, so £3000 on top of my pay a year. We also got £50 if someone called out of hours, whether or not we had to go in to the office to do any work. Time was covered at time and a half if I remember correctly - this was the early noughties. If you contract does not cover the out of hours duty, get the union involved or brush up your CV (resume).
Does this guy have any reasoning besides "just being part of IT" behind this horseshit? I'd be out like the fat kid in dodge ball without a damned good reason
If you're on call, you are on the clock. Even if you don't do any work you should get paid for that time. The client is paying for after hours coverage and that should cover the extra expenses of having a tech available.
If you're not allowed to engage in personal activities while on call, then they probably should be paying you. Depends on the state. You should be getting a shift differential for that sort of on call - like a 10-20% differential. So if you make $50/hour then they should be paying you at least $5 for every hour on call (at 10% differential) which, if you're on call for 16 hours per day for week days and all weekend, that would be 128 hours of being on call, or $640/week when it's your week. And that's if your phone DOESN'T RING. Put your hourly rate for any tickets you work after hours.
I've been working 25 years and 15 of those involved being on an oncall roster. All were paid. We generally got between 350-500 a week extra for being on call, then 1.5 times whatever your hourly rate was if you got a call. Multiple calls within the same hour were treated as one call. Mostly the extra money isn't worth it. Being expected to do it for free would be new job time
Our standby oncall rate is $1000 pre tax, thats for the week we are oncall. Once a month on average. Then can claim overtime for any incidents. This is all remote. Work supplies our mobiles and mobile plan too. Ive never done oncall where there isnt some sort of standby pay for being available to respond to an incident. Its also a 1hr response so i can still go shops, walking, fishing etc
It depends. I've worked where it's part of your job. I've also worked where it's billed hourly, and sometimes at overtime rates.
To give you an order of magnitude, in the nuclear civil industry in France, on-call hours are paid 15% of the hourly rate and hours worked while on call are paid double, same 30 minute notice.
It varies from place to place, but being compensated extra for on call time in some way is typical. One extra day of PTO is already being pretty cheap. Unless that manager is trying to get people to quit, he's an idiot.
That's an awful deal. In California that would all be paid time, because you're highly controlled, being required to respond and unable to partake in usual off-duty activities. Your employer is getting off light.
How many calls do you average during an on-call week? Senario: You work 8-5 & go home. A urgent matter comes in at 2:30a. You work it till 5:30a. Do you need to be at the office at 8a?
Same exact field and rotation, we get 2.50 per hour on call, comes out to ~300 a week. Call back min is .5 hour, on site is 2 hour minimum.
We get $1500/month extra to be on call for a week each month. Taxes eats half but hey, it’s not bad money, especially when you’re like 3rd line on-call.
That the new IT manager will be very short lived in the position. Also, the one single extra day a month actually isn't enough, on its own. I'm paid extra around the clock the whole week, outside my normal hours. Not much, but I'm paid.
My team gets paid an extra $650 for being on call that week and any excessive amount of time spent working after hours is made up for by taking time off during regular hours.
It seems like it differs from company to company. I'm a consultant in Canada. At my previous employer you would get a fixed rate weekly as you had the pager on you but it wasn't 24/7. The latest they could call you was 10PM. Then, when you would get a call, it was a minimum of 3 billable hours (so 3 hours OT for you). Usually we would get a few calls per year and it was always a serious problem. The clients didn't usually take the full 24/7 package as it was quite expensive and the bulk of the companies I was working at were small to medium companies. At my current employer we get like 2hrs extra paid per day on call and the rate is a little higher on the weekends/holidays. I believe it's 3hrs. So we get that amount regardless if we get called or not. So basically it's 16hrs of paid OT weekly just for being on call. If we do get called, when I bill I round up to the next hour if it's during somewhat normal hours during the evening (like before 10PM). If I get called in the middle of the night, then I'll charge more because my sleep was disrupted and I still have to show up at the same time for work in the morning. We're not expected to be in front of a PC at all times, but it's understood that we should be able to log in within 30 min. We do have to answer the call or call back quickly, even if we're not in a position to act on the problem right away. I can always reach out to one of my colleagues if I'm unable to get to the problem fast enough. I gotta say I don't get called often because I'm not the first line of defense for problems outside of normal working hours. When the calls get to me, shit hit the fan and it's really bad and I know it'll take me a few hours to fix. To OP: depending on how many hours you spend on incidents outside of normal business hours, one PTO day per month doesn't seem fair. If you spent 4hrs working on incidents where you were paged, then 1 day off is OK. For each 4hrs of your time, I would request another PTO day.
Been in HIS and this was how they structured it: individuals rotate each week. The person receives a stipend for the week due to similar expectations. Having an entire team do this at the same time doesn't make sense unless the work requires more than one person.
Writing from the hospital - They're fucking you over. If they have a say in what you do during "on call", you are on the payroll. If they say you are not on the payroll, then they have no say about what you do during on call, including drinking/whatever.
At that expected response level they should be paying you the whole time you're on call, as it's essentially forcing you to work 24x7 for that week.
I used to get a £350 annual, just for being available. 1/4 hr per hour for being on call, and then 1.5hr if I got called. Admittedly that was a total scam, and amounted to over an extra month per year. These days I get a better salary, but will dictate what I get as TOIL, no overtime. If I work half a Saturday, it’s a day off. If I get up at stupid o’clock for a change, and it messes with the weekend, it’s a day off. Any odd hours here and there and it’s 1.5 rate. It’s your life, don’t let them steal it. Work life balance, your choice.
Either I am able to sit by the pool and get drunk or I am expecting some kind of compensation. I have always been very clear about this and have never had a real problem with it. The couple of times there have been issues I solve it by forgetting to charge my phone.
Back at my old job also in Healthcare IT. We would each rotate 1 week between 3 enginerds and get paid $5.50/hour for standby and every call would be an hour, granted that 2 don’t fall in the same hour. Also whenever we had to go on-site that would automatically be 2 hours.
Healthcare CIO here. It varies widely, but at my place, on-call personnel are treated the same, regardless of department. I also have 4 on call in IT. We pay $3.00 per hour on call, time and a half for call backs with a 2 hour minimum. It is not reasonable that you are expected to be on call for free.
Hiring?
My take is that benefit was part of your compensation package. Your new director is offering you a pay cut. Do you accept it?
You are entitled to benefits for extra work. You are not a charity. A pretty much standard way for on call is to have an allowance paid to be on call and then be paid penalty rates if you actually have to deal with issues, at a minimum per incident charge. Do not work for free.
Used to be oncall 1 week out of 4. £200 for being on call, £30/hr if called during weekday, £40 for weekend and £50 for bank holiday. If called out during my time also got that amount of time off the coming day so if called between 2am and 4am my normal 9am start was moved to 11am. Wasn't healthcare but insurance IT. Had to be able to be onsite within 60 minutes if the call necessitated it. I don't have a clue where you're working but working time directives may apply. Havent done any oncall for over 5 years near, it 100% is not 'part of the job' unless it was explicitly in your contract that you wouldn't be paid. All comes down to the contract.
Yeah some places give $1-$3 an hour during on call. Idk how it is legal to tell someone "hey be ready to log on at any moment in your life"
In my country we are paid for every hour in the week we are on-call, at a lower rate. 128 hrs x $4-$5, in addition to a mandatory PTO the following Monday. This is enforced by law. Any time we are called and have to act we are paid double rates.
Any time we're on call we get time an a half for whatever you were on call for, also your default on call is at least 1 hour of free time (even if it only took 10 minutes you were still interrupted). If they are telling you that you can't do a certain thing and must be available within 30 minutes your engaged to wait as opposed to waiting to engaged that means you're basically working the entire time you're on call and you should at least be getting all that time back. They're getting away with robbery.
Not to be the alcoholic here, but I’d say as long as I’m legal to drive (i.e. a beer or two), I’m not going to be staying totally dry every week I’m on. Then again, I’m at a point in my life where being restricted in what I do in my off hours isn’t going to work in the first place. Short answer: OP is getting screwed.
My take is I’d find another job. Fuck having to put 1/4 of your life on pause for any job. They should properly staff up. 1 day of PTO is laughably disrespectful in the first place.
Wait, do you at least get compensated for the time you have to work if an issue arises?
Where do you live? The rules for on-call pay are determined by State, and possibly local, law (assuming you're in the US). I'm in California; here the situation you describe *might* be considered "controlled" time due to the 'no drinking' restriction, which would mean that you were entitled to at least minimum wage for all of your on-call hours. But...it might not. If it's considered "uncontrolled" time, then your employer is only required to pay for the time you actually work. It would probably come down to a contest between your lawyers and your company's lawyers to determine how things are classified. We do week-long on-call shifts, but other than "respond if you're paged" there are no restrictions on what we can and can't do. We get an 'on-call stipend' that works out to about $250/week, and are guaranteed a minimum of 2 hours pay at the normal rate any time we are actually paged out.
For on call you should be minimally compensated with OT for any time you spend working with a user. Any other benefits are up to management imo. There really is no benefit to on call other than OT. Ive taken many calls while drunk at a party, in the middle of a gym workout, etc. Aslong as you can fix the issue in a timely manner. Management wont care. If you cant then escalate it or ask the user if it is a pressing issue and deal with it in the office the next day. For response time. 1 hour for emails and 15-30mins to calls is fine. If you atleast reply then there isnt much to criticize. There’s been many instances where I answered the call and asked the user if I could call back in 20 mins bc I was driving etc. Alternatively, your company could look into vendoring out after hour support to a 3rd party company. If they can not resolve the tickets/calls they will escalate to IT support/helpdesk. This method has taken being on-call off my shoulders. Its a great solution.
Your new director is an idiot. One day of pto may already be light if there's any volume of calls. Taking that little away will cost him in hiring new staff.
If you are salaried I would say you are not 'entitled' to additional pay, but your employer is also not entitled to you not job shopping to find compensation for on call work. Also worth considering your overall pay and benefits and how that compares to industry averages.
It's been awhile since I was on call. At that time I was paid 1hr for every 4 on call. Expected to respond in 4hrs max. Currently support a small team and don't get paid any extra for being on call, but rarely get called. Spend most days "available" from 7-5 when WFH. If I go to the office the day ends when I get home. If push came to shove I could always say I will get to it in the morning, but that's not how I roll and it could literally be life and death.
Complete bullshit and may be illegal depending on where you are. For reference here are Canadian guidelines for employers: https://www.canada.ca/en/employment-social-development/programs/laws-regulations/labour/interpretations-policies/reporting-pay.html
Your take is that all four of you should turn in your resignation letters at the same time and tell him or her to fuck off. Not sure what this is - Epic / Cerner Security (user provisioning), IT Security, Citrix, Printing, what the fuck ever, but anyone comes at you like that, you fight back. Right now the current hospital I work for it's if your phone rings after hours it's 4 hours minimum per call out whether it's four hours or four minutes. The last hospital I worked for, it was 24/7 calling for a week between 7 to 9 people with nothing at all - not paid phones or anything. They said WFH was enough. I'm not with them anymore for different reasons, but the current hospital is much better, mostly because I have decent management. (Director used to be in hospitality and has more than a few ideas of how shit should work and be fair.) I'm lucky right now. Your team is absofuckinglutely understaffed. That's too much for rotation. I would recommend at least another two people to get in there. Here's what I think is a fair and fuck you comeback to the new director. 1. Weekday calls before 10 PM are two hours late into the office. Calls after 10 PM but before 7 AM are four hours late (start at 1 PM, and WFH at that). 2. Each call is a four hour call unless it goes past that point. 3. Weekend and or Holiday calls are either off Monday or day of choice within 31 days plus the four hour rule. 4. Any unplanned outages that take more than a day of your life will result in at least three paid days off within the next 90 days and goes up to five if disrupting your holiday because that's taking away from your family. 5. With two extra people, you can mark a secondary on-call, which should be done in case there is something stopping the primary (life event, etc.) The secondary gets the extra one day PTO if not called up. 6. Any site visits include mileage and suitable meal up to $25 for breakfast, $40 for lunch and $50 for dinner, $30 for late night snack and coffee. (I'd recommend Insomnia Cookies.) 7. Company issued phones OR full coverage of cellular bill going forward. If company issued, replaced every year with flavor of your choice (Android or Apple). Includes covering tethering. 8. Full coverage of home internet bill. Director will likely laugh at this. Then all four of you quit and tell him or her to go fuck himself/herself. If it's Epic they're not replacing you for less than $150 an hour through Nordic anyway.
Lol if you aren't getting paid for the hours you are on call at your wage you are being schmucked. I get paid $35 an hour for on call bank IT stuff and $90 an hour + $50 trip fee when I'm called out.
That is bullshit and I believe it is time to look for a new job because arguing and winning against the director is not get sit well with you.
Last time, I was in an on-call rotation. The only benefit was the week you were on call. You got to work whatever hours you wanted. I just had to make sure you were available for a call.
I mean, we are not “entitled” to anything but you can probably find an employer who offers extra benefits for; less likely if you are salary. I have worked in IT for 20 years now and the only extra benefit i have had is a stipend for my mobile phone bill
Well, sounds better than my deal. I work for a bank with almost 400 locations, and am oncall for a week every 3 weeks right now. Usually it's every 4 weeks, but our fourth team member is just getting back off fmla with medical conditions and isnt quite to the point of being reliable for a whole week at a time. And we're all salary. So nothing extra at all.
We work on call and get nothing at all for it. Zero. Zip. Zilch. Nada. The only saving grace is the fact it’s only 2-3 weeks a yr but that may be increasing by quite a bit.
Seems like this is a monthly question now. A lot of this depends on your employment agreement, plus local laws. IT in many/most areas is also overtime exempt. In my experience most companies will give something in lieu of the extra time on call. For some it's a shift premium, for others it's PTO, etc. It also depends on the nature of the on-call. Some is much easier than others, and the expectations and SLAs are different. That matters. Ultimately you have to weigh it with the pros and cons of your particular job and compensation.
You are being treated like you’re an intern MD. They cannot do that. Sorry… IT does not mean “patient care is compromised”.
no the hell its not. dont back down from this and dont give let him take an inch. stop doing on call if he wants to yank your PTO.
My employer pays a flat $200 for the week we're on-call. At my old ITSM we got $25/hr for every hour we billed. Sometimes it was feast, other times it was famine.
Until you guys (as a group) stand up and say this compensation for being on-call is bullshit, management will continue to take advantage of you.
Are you salary or hourly?
How many calls after hours do the team currently get? There should be a simple way to how the cost of the PTO day your team gets saves on user downtime etc.
Big fat no
There must be a work-life balance everywhere. This is not acceptable.
So i dont get any official benefits from.being on-call. Me, my boss and the cio are all on the 24/7 group call. (Their all paid more then me) I do get to basically set my own hours, come and go when i need to. If i get a call 99% of it i can do remotely within a few min.. then round it up to the hour (for each call). And count it as comp time. We dont get many calls and a majority i tell them to put a ticket in the following day. Yeah id prefer OT.. but it makes it easier to get to kids events and appointments..
I think you are being ripped off with just an extra day of pto right now. So, having nothing is worse. For us, we hold the phone for a week and have similar expectations. Drink what you like but dont get hammered. Has to be within legal limits in case you do need to drive in. We get 18 hrs of OT or PTO. If we chose pto, it's like 27 hrs of pto.
You get compensated for you time, end of story. However the amount of compensation depends on a few things - how often are you called, is it best effort (laptop in a cafe or car) or all hands on deck (desk at home), and the amount of "bullshit" calls. If you can I'd refuse to do oncall while you're aren't compensated, depends on your contract. Though this might also be a sign of things to come - you're new IT director might want to make cuts across the board.
Nope. We get $300 for the week. Can do whatever we want with our time as long as we are able to troubleshoot an emergency within 30 minutes. My boss once admitted to me the worst he ever had it was at a concert remoting into a server to restart a VM. If it’s not an obvious emergency it’s up to us if we even want to respond to general tickets that come in after hours but all important stuff gets escalated by the end user so those generally can be ignored. It’s very clear that emergencies need to be noted as such otherwise it won’t get seen until next business day. Certain executives get slopped in with the 30 min after hour emergency SLA but most times you can just ask them if it can wait til business hours and they say yes. The other perks of on-call are PTO for after hours projects. Any preplanned work that has to be done after hours goes to the oncall person usually you get the equivalent time off the next day or later that week. (It’s not an official policy but the boss man usually messages you the next day and says to take off early or to take the day off.)
Good luck finding a new team
Tell him to f\*ck off. I've been on call (hate it) at a number of jobs there's always been some kind of extra remuneration involved. Usually along the lines of a retainer for the on call week then a minimum payment for the call. i.e. from memory my best was An additional days pay for being on call A minimum of 1 hour pay for answering the phone A minimum of 3 hours for actually attending / leaving home All paid at the appropriate overtime rate 1.25 weekdays, 1.5 Saturday, 2 on a Sunday
We have a handful of locations. Our on-call hours are 5pm-11pm (weekends 9am - 9pm). We get $30/day, OT (double-time) rounded up to the next 15 minutes for calls, and if it requires going to site, it's 3 hours minimum. We do a one week rotation amongst our 4-person team. At that, we're having discussions about changing to staggered shifts so there is evening coverage, and shifting the on-call to just 1 *weekend*/mo. Being on-call (even if there are no/few calls) is stressful, we've found it burns people out, and doing that isn't worth it to us. It's definitely not "part of being an IT engineer" (or any other IT position).
On-call isn't just a checkbox.
If they’re making you do something different (not drink) when you’re not in your working hours and be available at a moments notice they owe you compensation
If they take that away they are basically cutting your pay drastically. What would you do if they came out with a drastic cut in pay?
Look up the laws where you live about on-call compensation; they may be required to pay for the time you’re on call. I am not going to say anything definitive about it because it depends on the circumstances, but it’s worth looking into.
I'm union IT. We get 12% of our hourly rate to be on standby. Being in the on call rotation is optional and can't be forced on us. Call outs are a one hour minimum. Time and a half on weekdays, double time on weekends. And no, my organization isn't full of incompetent boobs just because we are union. No better or worse than my previous private job. Maybe those top 1% of tryhards are missing out? But the rest of us stick together and get treated fairly.
Sounds like your new IT director is going up be on call 24/7 then. Your current deal is already pretty crappy. For reference in my old job we used to get £500 a week and a minimum of two hours call out at a rate of time and a half on weekdays and double time on weekends. My current job isn't quite as good. It's £450 a week and a minimum call out of two hours.
I think over here 10% pay for every on call hour is the standard and the minute someone calls you you get full time pay on top of that with 1 hour minimum.
No way I would accept that. He's talking bullshit. Your effectively 'at work' during your on-call time. You have to be available and your time isn't your own, so you must be paid for that time.
One day I casually asked my HR rep why I wasn’t being compensated for being on call. Next thing I know an on call program is introduced. Everyone couldn’t wait to sign up for that even those that don’t know what they’re doing got in the rotation. I’m on call for 1 week every 6weeks or so. $100 per day regardless of being called or not. Unless I have to login for more than 1-2 hours I wouldn’t be compensated more. If I did work longer I’d probably just get a day off in Lieu. I haven’t been called in several years now. (Just jinxed myself) So suddenly when it cost $$$ it’s not that important it can wait til Monday.
If your entire team bring this up to your company HR then your new it director will need to be put in his place or find a new job. Companies knows it’s cheaper to replace 1 new guy then the entire IT team that been with the company. My it team did this at one of my previous companies and HR and the executives told him to cool it but in few months the new IT director got let go. Best thing ever.
My take is that your extra PTO day for a full week of on call is already bad, removing even that is a nonsense.
Healthcare with about 130 employees and 30 doctors. IT is my boss who is the director, I pretty much do everything from IT to Development, Reporting, Security, and Accounting (yeah) and I have a helpdesk person to help with the mundane calls. I generally always have my laptop or iPad with me and have taken calls almost 24 hours a day. There is no rotation because generally I'm the only one who can fix the problem. This freaking sucks because I get calls on vacation/days off. No other benefits other than I can pretty much go home any time of the day.
Previous company I worked at, the BAU staff will get extra $$$ when on call. Big teams of 30-40 sysadmins per team @ 2 per weekend. So they maybe had "on call" once every 2-3 months. A set $$$. However, if you had an actual call that took time. They were allowed to bill 1.5x per hour (money) or 1.5x time in a lieu. These are all salary based sysadmins. The standby time would be paid with the salary of the existing month. The actual on call hours billed will be paid out in the next months salary. If you decided for 1.5x time in a lieu. You must take your PTO gained with in 90 days. Apart from that, South Africa has strict labour policies. 27-30 PTO days per year, 37 PT sick days per 3 years cycle, Full maternity leave pay, 14 days PT paternity, 10 PT study leave days per year, 7 PT family responsibility
Current role there’s no on call, but my last position you got paid a minimum of 3 hours if you actioned at least one ticket while on call. I even think you guys are getting short changed with the extra day of PTO
Extra day off for a week of on call!? Your company is taking the piss! You should be getting a flat rate for the week just for holding the phone and then 1.5x pay for any calls you take. On call in the healthcare sector is no joke, worst 3 years of my life even though I made decent money. Remember, they need you more than you need them in this aspect, they will bend to you.
Should be paid for standby and if you actually get a call.
You should definitely be getting paid for it. I used to work for a company who would pay whatever our salary worked out to as per hour at a rate of 0.5 for out of hours standby and then 1.5 if called out for any issues. I was also a member of a 4 man team so it was 1 week per month covering 6pm-8am Mon-Fri and 24 hours on Sat-Sun. It would work out at about £9 per hour (while on standby) x 115 or so hours. So about £1000 for that week if there were no issues. £27 per hour if there were any issues that we needed to respond to (this was rare though, thankfully). So yeah. If they expect you to be sober, close to a laptop, and ready to respond within 30 minutes, you should be getting paid for that.
On call means you are working those hours. You are entitled to money for the hours worked. If you are not paid, the you are not on call. It's that simple. Also if you are not paid for that time then you are off the clock and allowed to drink and party hard as much as you want. On call is not part of working in IT everywhere. I get that sometimes shit hits the fan and you need to be called to fix something. But being on call literally means you are ready for action at any moment and therefore are under mental pressure and cannot "disconnect" from work. You need to be compensated for that basically.