I was looking at a potential new job until it occurred to me to ask about dealing with “on-call” support.
As I work in tech, there is usually an expectation that some level of support is handled off hours in case systems go down. However this position didn’t have any compensation for making yourself available and generally only 15 mins from a phone or computer to support the systems. The best they could offer was “time in-lieu” if you get called, which is basically saying they’ll let you work your contracted maximum hours despite it being unsociable hours.
Fuck that.
After seeing elsewhere someone commenting that they would refuse to on-call if there was also a “return to office”, because if they had to go to the office to work, then how could they possibly support it from home, it made me wonder what other things should I remember to enquire about when interviewing and asking the hiring company?
lol kinda, it was a real office with 3 staff: CEO, CFO, and assistant. I was weirded out seeing all three were ~20 years old. He said I could make my own subsidiary and be my own CEO one day. I asked for the parent company name and did a quick Google when he stepped out of the room for a second. Not only saw the MLM stuff but also a culture of employee abuse and hazing in the subsidiaries. I just walked out at that point.