You should really consider saying no to required on-call

Posted by ninetofivedev@reddit | ExperiencedDevs | View on Reddit | 44 comments

So in the most recent rendition, I ran into someone who feels that the only way to make good money in this industry is to subject yourself to companies that have required on-call.

Now if your company has stable platforms, and you rarely if ever need to actually login after hours to deal with an issue, this isn't for you.

However, if you're one of the many software engineers, where a required part of the job is that every week, multiple week nights, you're responsible for the cadence of some delivery or the system just goes down so much that you know damn sure you're going to be dealing with some shit after hours. This post is for you.

So let's get down to the nitty gritty. What are you doing when you agree to working around the clock to support systems outages and failures.

You're supporting a dev culture where outages are considered acceptable and someone will be around to clean up the mess.
You're devaluing your time. You're signaling to the company that they can squeeze more out of you.
You're setting yourself and the company up for failure. This way of operating isn't sustainable.

I don't know why people put up with this. I don't even know how it became a normal way of operating for a significant, sizable set of companies.

Don't do it. Instead push for operationalizing the company.

[-]

gjionergqwebrlkbjg@reddit

As long as you are willing to lose your job over this, sure.

[-]

SolidDeveloper@reddit

In some European countries (maybe most?), working out of regular hours is required by law to be paid at a much higher hourly rate compared to your regular salary.

[-]

ecethrowaway01@reddit

How does this rate compare to a US Big Tech salary?

[-]

SolidDeveloper@reddit

I don’t know, but here are some examples:

In France, overtime is generally paid at +25% for hours 36–43 in the week and +50% after that.
In Belgium, authorised overtime generally carries a legal supplement of +50% on ordinary weekdays and +100% on Sundays and public holidays.
In Spain, overtime must be compensated, but there is no single universal legal percentage. If paid, overtime must be paid at not less than the ordinary hourly rate, and otherwise it can be compensated with time off; the exact premium is commonly set by collective agreement.
In Romania, overtime should first be compensated with paid time off within 90 calendar days. If that cannot be given, the employee must receive a salary increase of at least 75% of the basic salary for the overtime hours worked.

[-]

ecethrowaway01@reddit

How does overtime contrast with oncall? Depending on intensity, a lot of oncall work is nothing

[-]

bfreis@reddit

Are you carrying your laptop to places you wouldn't normally be carrying it if you weren't on call? Is it a time when it's possible that your pager may go off? Is there an expectation that you may need to be ready to join some remote call within X amount of time outside your regular business hours?

If so, generally in countries with cultures where personal life is more important than work you'd be paid overtime if any of that is true. Intensity would be irrelevant. All that matters is being ready to respond at a moments notice.

[-]

ecethrowaway01@reddit

Interesting. I'd still anticipate being paid considerably more in my current USA job

[-]

Cermettt@reddit

Worked at a company a few years ago, that paid just below market value, but had a extremely generous on-call compensation. So generous that we had people wanting to be on-call and helped line up guys with families/debt first. Love EU for this.

[-]

gjionergqwebrlkbjg@reddit

Sure, but in those countries you are signing a contract which spells out on-call duties, it doesn't exactly come as a surprise.

[-]

engineered_academic@reddit

Every company I have been in with on-call that started as a dumpsterfire we have fixed that shit so fast as soon as the first nightly page hit.

It's easy to explain to the higher ups how disruptive nightly pages are. If they are family people, you just have to explain to them how much would they pay to stop their babies from crying in the middle of the night so they could get good sleep and be productive at work. When you frame it in that context, most execs understand the need to prioritize this work.

I try to only apply to places that have a "follow the sun" on call rotation schedule. It's 2026, remote work is a thing, there is no reason for any established company to NOT have a follow the sun shift schedule, especially if they are weak in operations and having consistent outages.

You NEED a strong CI/CD and o Observability practice. 99% of all outages are caused by a code change in the orgs that I have been in. Automatic rollbacks make alerts go away. Lets be honest it's what you do 99% of the time anyway when you get paged. Rarely does something break immediately, but you will start to see key indicators start to trend upwards. Have two sets of monitors:m thresholds: One for machines and one for humans.

I could go on and on but everywhere I worked we had Monday through Friday 9-5 workdays. I can count on one hand the times I had to get up at midnight to fix an issue. We had a 9's rate that would make Github jealous. It's not hard to do and the fixes are relatively simple.

[-]

engineered_academic@reddit

Ya'll may disagree with OP's takes but they are generating valuable insightful content that promotes discussion. They have been an insightful contributor to this sub for a while now. Most likely not a bot and not AI generated. This kind of post sure beats the glut of AI doomerism I have to delete everyday and imparts valuable experience and insight instead of attempting to crowdsourcing responses with limited effort.

[-]

baezizbae@reddit

I don't know why people put up with this.

I don’t know why you think your experience with on-call is universally applicable to everyone else’s. Do you have an answer for that?

[-]

ninetofivedev@reddit (OP)

I don't know why you think that is what I was implying.

[-]

signedupjusttodothis@reddit

The way you've written the post, especially those three bullet points come across very acerbic and whether you intended to or not, does, yes, like you're painting with a very broad brush here.

On-Call isn't my favorite activity either, and while I'm lucky it's not an "every week" thing, participating in it are often table-stakes for the job for many of us, and in some better cases, paid quite handsomely-as you're hopefully reading and taking in from several other comments being left for you.

[-]

ninetofivedev@reddit (OP)

What are the odds that you'd post in the exact subreddits of the person I blocked? You both happen to be from Chicago, like the colts and NFL, and post in experienced devs.

[-]

Pleasant-Cellist-927@reddit

Why do you go diving in the post histories of people replying to you instead of just answering the question?

[-]

ninetofivedev@reddit (OP)

I blocked someone and then immediately got a reply from someone else.

I assumed it was a sock puppet account and I was right. I don’t know what to tell you. I do it because it works?

Why do you care?

[-]

signedupjusttodothis@reddit

Husband and husband, probably.

[-]

ProbablyPuck@reddit

I'd been "raised in it" so to speak. So I was surprised when I joined a team that was only just transitioning to required on-call. The transition itself was not handled well, and the entire development team was grappling with this expectation of extra work hours with no compensation (monetary, time, or even a break after too many calls).

Your note about "setting the expectation that someone will be around to clean up the mess" was impactful for me. That's a really good point.

[-]

obelix_dogmatix@reddit

That’s the entire cloud industry. All of it. Now think how much you use it before you yap your elitist high horse thoughts next time.

[-]

Izacus@reddit

Not being buggered in the middle of the night by shitty web code that noone cares about isn't "yapping". Don't be angry because others protect their sanity and free time by not being bullied into unpaid oncall.

[-]

obelix_dogmatix@reddit

Maybe don’t assume everyone’s situation. You or OP might have the luxury and privilege to be able to push back. Many don’t.

[-]

serial_crusher@reddit

It's not really a simple binary between companies where the system is stable vs. those with huge firefights. Forcing devs to be on-call is a forcing function to make that stability happen. When there's a guy whose job it is to get paged at night, nobody minds writing buggy software that keeps that guy employed. But when the devs who build the product are the ones getting paged at night and don't want to, they're incentivized to avoid the bugs in the first place.

So the question is whether you want to step in to the short-term chaos of a company just starting that transition, or whether the company is failing to actually address issues and fix stability.

[-]

martinbean@reddit

You should really consider doing something else with your time instead of posting these LLM-generated “You should consider…” posts.

[-]

ninetofivedev@reddit (OP)

0% LLM generated. Every character was typed out the old fashioned way.

[-]

Empanatacion@reddit

I will vouch that OP is a long time poster of stubborn, out of touch hot takes that are definitely the product of a human.

[-]

ninetofivedev@reddit (OP)

Thank you.

[-]

Empanatacion@reddit

Plot twist: I am a Golden Retriever

[-]

Bulky_Raspberry@reddit

"So let's get down to the nitty gritty"

No human writes like this

[-]

ninetofivedev@reddit (OP)

I hate to tell you this, brother, but your ability to detect AI is not as good as you think it is.

I promise you that phrase existed before AI and I promise you that Claude code took no part in generating this post.

[-]

but_why_n0t@reddit

May you not see their posts on your feed ever again 😅

[-]

Fruloops@reddit

I suspect the time investment on OPs side is mininal

[-]

ninetofivedev@reddit (OP)

It was something I was thinking about over the weekend. Spent about 15 minutes typing up the post.

Feel free to disagree with the premise. I appreciate the discussion.

[-]

ginamegi@reddit

So is your solution to create software that does not have outages, or is it to make sure your users are aware that 12+ hour overnight outages are normal and won’t be resolved until after 9am?

[-]

ninetofivedev@reddit (OP)

Is your culture one that tolerates frequent outages?

[-]

ginamegi@reddit

Are you suggesting to us developers to simply shift the culture of our workplace to focus on stable clean code, technical debt, and timely bug fixes in order to prevent outages? I don't understand what practical change you're going for.

[-]

but_why_n0t@reddit

Being oncall doesn't encourage bad code my dude, it's acknowledging that things can go wrong and that you need to have contingency plans in place to ensure reliability. Do you also hate disaster recovery drills? Fire fighters?

PS: What companies are your acquaintances in that require them to be oncall every week?

[-]

duddnddkslsep@reddit

I would like to keep my job in exchange for a quarterly on-call week, when I get to enjoy not doing feature work and get paid. I have never gotten pinged at 3am.

[-]

throwaway_0x90@reddit

"However, if you're one of the many software engineers, where a required part of the job is that every week, multiple week nights, you're responsible for the cadence of some delivery or the system just goes down so much that"

Two problems here,

1. Where's the on call rotation?
1. This is an opportunity for someone to step up and solve this issue. Figure out what's breaking and fix it so it stops happening, or at least reduce it.

[-]

TheOwlHypothesis@reddit

Every week? Multiple nights a week?

All the companies I interviewed at recently had very reasonable on call expectations that are something like 1 week every 4-6 weeks. And many don't expect you to focus on normal work during that time, and tend to avoid late night pages (ever heard of "Follow the sun"?)

Outages aren't always the company's fault either. Remember any of the many recent times AWS or GitHub has had outages? Those effect everyone using those platforms.

If you think you're too good to participate in on-call there are TONS of places to work that don't require it. Go work at those. OR enjoy forfeiting a whole category of opportunities that doe require on-call (either by losing your job or being disqualified from being hired)

Any company with users who rely on their services being available will die without good support though. I'm not sure how you can justify saying it sets the company up for "failure".

[-]