Working in backbone operations for a mid sized ISP, we sure don't have 1:30 meetings, but we do have scheduled 1:30 maintenance events (planned several weeks in advance), and people on the on-call list are expected to be available for middle of the night emergencies. Catastrophic fiber cuts and equipment failures like a roof failing and pouring water onto a DWDM chassis have the tendency to occur at fun times like 0330 in the morning on a holiday.
It is expected and known that if you do something like respond to a 0130 in the morning emergency and work the issue until 0430, then go to sleep, that you're going to sleep until whenever you wake up in the mid afternoon and probably not be useful for any other tasks that day.
I should point out that the salaried employees expected to respond to such things are compensated appropriately, and the general practice is to have a group of people so that each person is only on-call for some portion of each month.
The rank and file NOC employees and fiber splicers, field crews, field technicians are hourly employees and get overtime for incidents as described above. Depending on the state and labor laws they're also paid an hourly rate simply for being on-call, even if nothing happens, for the duration of their on-call rotation week(s).
Everything you said sounds reasonable. Tasks and hours are related to the specific work at hand, and mitigations are then given, as temporary allowances, to employees if extra work is demanded that are outside of "core hours"
I was just trying to highlight that I personally hate "core hours" and that if I'm on a marathon coding session from 9pm to 4am, and I'm intermittently unavailable from some arbitrary time (say 11:15am to 11:50am) and then I get a bunch of messages from bosses saying "where were you??" and I then explain that I was actually writing code, point to some commits and say "see? I did all this stuff" and they say "you are expected to work from 9am to 6pm" it feels like a slap in the face. I think good management should accept that people aren't robots (unless there is an outage, fair enough) and consider people's working preferences in their decisions.
Anyways, I'm sure you have some awesome war stories with deployments/maintenance events. You should share them sometime :D
There are definitely good reasons to, at minimum, have you _available_ from 9-6; say, for a meeting or to bring a coworker up to speed on what you're working on, but at the same time you don't necessarily need to be pinned to your desktop for the entire period of time to do that. Since remote working started I've taken advantage of that big time by just running errands during the work day but keeping my phone close by in case I get a ping on Slack.
I have a feeling you would be shocked at the percentage of people in wealthy country's who would wake up at 1:30am every day for a meeting for 130k. Fucked up is very strong language.
I'd prefer a 1:30am meeting compared to a 9:30am meeting lol, I was just trying to appeal to what is most preferred, i.e. normal 9am to 6pm "working hours"
I was gearing my response in terms of what seems reasonable to expect... but yeah I'm sure everyone would try to stretch themselves to absorb more capital.
No, they pay you a salary based on agreed working hours, usually a 40 hour working week. If that wasn't the case, they'd be firing you for going home at the end of the day.
"No, they pay you a salary based on agreed working hours, usually a 40 hour working week. If that wasn't the case, they'd be firing you for going home at the end of the day."
Hmm, do they? It's not in my contract, and (unfortunately) the labour law in Ontario for my profession doesn't support it either. We are expected to be "deliverable based" I think, rather than effort/work based. IANAL etc, but my observation is that Hourly employees are compensated for their hours; but it's less straightforward for salaried workers.
I'm in IT, and IIRC IT is one of the professions where salaried FTEs are not entitled to overtime in Ontario, but all of the salaried FTE contracts I've ever signed since the mid 90s had a specified number (usually 40) of working hours.
This isn't true in my experience (USA). No salaried job I've worked at has contractually stated working hours. All mainstream tech jobs. People go home at reasonable times due to social norms, not because it's in a contract.
No, they pay you to go home at the end of the day. That's part of your contract.
If you instead go to another job at the end of your eight hours, they'll fire you.
If you even go to your secret other home you haven't told them about in another state (or worse, another country), and that creates tax withholding obligations in that state, they may not fire you, but they will be very displeased.
> No, they pay you to go home at the end of the day. That's part of your contract.
Does your contract actually say this explicitly? Mine doesn't and I'm not sure it'd even be enforceable if it did.
> If you instead go to another job at the end of your eight hours, they'll fire you.
You are aware that there is a fairly large number of people who work multiple jobs, right? And that they usually don't ask permission to do so?
Now, it is true that this isn't common in software development jobs, but employment contracts for software development jobs aren't magic -- they're pretty much the same as any other employment contract.
(It's also probably not legal to fire someone for working a second job, at least here in Australia.)
I am also floored that someone actually thinks that their job is something they're paid to do 24/7.
I am prohibited by my employment contract from working a second job without approval.
It doesn't say, of course, that I'm supposed to go home. I can go to the bar, the library, the bowling alley, whatever. But it does say that I can't hold a second paid job (and it does demand that I truthfully tell them where I live). I am very much being paid not to work a second job.
Maybe you aren't! But I am, this is fairly normal for salaried positions in America, it's almost certainly enforceable, and it's something I willingly signed and accepted when I took this job.
I am aware there are a large number of people working non-salaried jobs who work multiple jobs. This thread is specifically about salaried jobs.
More relevantly to the thread, my contract also says that any work I do which is related to my employer's actual business is owned by my employer, whether or not I do it on work time or at work. I paid actual lawyers to review that portion of the contract before I signed it, and they told me it is absolutely enforceable. In this case, the question is whether an IBM employee can hack on an IBM-authored, IBM-maintained driver for IBM computers, contributing to which used to be part of their job on the side. It would be absolutely defensible for IBM to say they own this work regardless of when it happens, and it would be frankly surprising if the employment contract did not say that.
I think it's the inherent weirdness of what USA considers "salaried" job - it seems to me that you essentially don't have set hours, your pay isn't related to the hours you put in, and any overtime gets waived in programming by the overtime exempt rule.
If this sounds to you like shit sandwich, that's because it is one, even if some people manage to make it work with less hours than norm.
> Does your contract actually say this explicitly? Mine doesn't and I'm not sure it'd even be enforceable if it did.
moonlighting clauses are fairly standard and I'd be surprised if your contract doesn't include one.
> You are aware that there is a fairly large number of people who work multiple jobs, right? And that they usually don't ask permission to do so?
Yes, people violate their employment contracts.
> (It's also probably not legal to fire someone for working a second job, at least here in Australia.)
The enforceability of moonlight contracts may vary. For example working at a software company and moonlighting as a barista is less likely to be enforceable than working at a software company and moonlighting at another (or moonlighting as a freelance developer), at least in the US, the second is probably a violation.
Not that this matters in the US since you're usually at will anyway.
I get your point, but it seems pedantic. They still pay you for 40 hours a week. You are typically able to start a profitable side project in your own time.
On call should be optional and paid accordingly. It should not be a part of the job, because not everyone is fit to do it (physically, mentally, family-wise, or otherwise).
Incentivize people to take on-call time and those who are fit will take it.
I don’t think this is right: people who can’t do it shouldn’t be expected to, but software developers should support their application in production so that, if it’s hard to manage, they have an incentive to fix that problems: throwing code over the wall for an operations team to deal with is a clear case of externalizing negatives.
To some extent a good faith effort is in order, but someone who is perfectly capable of doing 99% of the job shouldn't be expected to respond to things at 3am unless they willingly do so for extra pay.
I for one am perfectly capable of advanced software engineering work but I am NOT capable of compromising my sleep without causing serious heart arrythmias. Some other person might have to deal with a baby. Some other person might sleep early and do meditation at that hour because it helps prevent panic attacks during the day. Everyone is different, and personal time and rest time should be respected. There is so much behind the curtain of off-work time that employers don't see, and don't need to see, they just need to respect that time.
In my experience this isn't a very good take, I've been woke up 50+ times in a 7 night span of on call, that fucking incentivized me to fix the issues. But that doesn't FUCK ALL to the product/sales people that actually direct where resources are spent. If the on call people ACTUALLY get to work on the on call issues, I think on call can work.
But in my experience, every single place I've worked, has had insane on call hours. And you were ALWAYS expected to do your normal work on top of the on call hours and you were NEVER given time to fix the issue that woke you up in the middle of the night.
Until the actually engineers/developers are in charge of their own schedules on call shifts will be fucking bullshit.
I think for some jobs it makes sense to have on-call as part of the job description, but it's heavily overused. If there isn't imminent danger I don't think it should be ever required to force someone to compromise rest.
If it's just a question of product uptime then you should have enough people and pay people extra to be on-call. And don't deploy things at 5pm on a Friday.
> Otherwise you’d be making under minimum wage if you were salaried and making less than $90k.
No, because if you have a $90k salary and job duties that qualify for wage and hour exemption under FLSA and any applicable state labor law at that salary, then, there is no minimum hourly wage.
That’s what it means to be exempt from wage and hour rules.
For FLSA, “computer related” work is exempt at a salary of just over $35k.
