Gods, I hated being on call. It was never part of our job description, but one day about a year after we were all hired, we were suddenly “on call” without any training for it.
No extra pay or benefits. Work a 12 hour day from being on call? Better show up tomorrow, same time.
What’s are the duties? Never explained. You must have a phone, and snooze the alarm within 1 minute, that’s all we knew. Can you drink? Can you go to the grocery store? Can you be 45 minutes away from an Internet connection? We were never told.
I got in trouble multiple times for not having reception inside the building. I asked for a company phone, and was denied.
How do you fix an issue? We had no idea how the IBM cloud infrastructure worked, so just struggle and hammer the snooze. I only ever fixed issues through my existing Linux knowledge, but all my coworkers only had Windows experience. Towards the end of that job, you could fix most calls by typing killall minerd (the cloud was super hacked).
Oh god. We had to be within one hour of the data center so that we could sit next to the broken hardware that we were not able to fix at 3 am anyway because fuck you.
What you describe is not ok, and it’s just letting the company walk all over you because it sounds like nobody had the experience to push back. There should be a senior guy somewhere in that team going “yo this is bullshit, we’re not doing this” and making the company define the criteria so you can say yes or no. Otherwise you just don’t comply, and everyone on the team has to be onboard with that. Gotta have boundaries in this career or they will literally own you and all your free time, and if shit hits the fan, they will scapegoat you in a heartbeat.
They need you more than you need them. Never forget that. There are lots, and lots, and lots of unfilled IT jobs out there.
I love being on call. I get 2-3 calls per week on average, totalling about 30 minutes of work.
I also get +1 day of paid vacation time and around 500€ additional pay for each week I’m on call.
And I get the company car for unlimited private use, as long as I stay within 1h driving distance to the workplace.
Gods, I hated being on call. It was never part of our job description, but one day about a year after we were all hired, we were suddenly “on call” without any training for it.
No extra pay or benefits. Work a 12 hour day from being on call? Better show up tomorrow, same time.
What’s are the duties? Never explained. You must have a phone, and snooze the alarm within 1 minute, that’s all we knew. Can you drink? Can you go to the grocery store? Can you be 45 minutes away from an Internet connection? We were never told.
I got in trouble multiple times for not having reception inside the building. I asked for a company phone, and was denied.
How do you fix an issue? We had no idea how the IBM cloud infrastructure worked, so just struggle and hammer the snooze. I only ever fixed issues through my existing Linux knowledge, but all my coworkers only had Windows experience. Towards the end of that job, you could fix most calls by typing
killall minerd(the cloud was super hacked).Oh god. We had to be within one hour of the data center so that we could sit next to the broken hardware that we were not able to fix at 3 am anyway because fuck you.
After 3 decades in IT let me share some wisdom.
What you describe is not ok, and it’s just letting the company walk all over you because it sounds like nobody had the experience to push back. There should be a senior guy somewhere in that team going “yo this is bullshit, we’re not doing this” and making the company define the criteria so you can say yes or no. Otherwise you just don’t comply, and everyone on the team has to be onboard with that. Gotta have boundaries in this career or they will literally own you and all your free time, and if shit hits the fan, they will scapegoat you in a heartbeat.
They need you more than you need them. Never forget that. There are lots, and lots, and lots of unfilled IT jobs out there.
I love being on call. I get 2-3 calls per week on average, totalling about 30 minutes of work.
I also get +1 day of paid vacation time and around 500€ additional pay for each week I’m on call.
And I get the company car for unlimited private use, as long as I stay within 1h driving distance to the workplace.