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?
The main thing I ask about on-call is what the scope is and how many people are covering it.
There’s one end where they have a kid who takes calls and literally 70% of them go to you, plus you are on call every other week because there’s only three on the rota and one guy quit/is on holiday.
And then there’s the other end where there’s multiple on call teams and your team only gets called for very specific reasons, you are one of 5-6 people on the rota, on call bonus is massive plus 1.5*wage for every call out.
We had a union shop here where standing-by with a cell phone after-hours got you regular wage 1:1. Call-outs were double-pay, minimum 4 hours. Really-really.