New top story on Hacker News: Ask HN: Any luck negotiating better terms for on-call?

Ask HN: Any luck negotiating better terms for on-call?
48 by ymnska | 63 comments on Hacker News.
(Throwaway account.) I work for a large software company on an on-call rotation that’s been getting more toilsome, and wondering if anyone has been in a similar place. Like many SV companies, on-call isn’t compensated with the rationale that it’s part of your engineering duties. I buy this to some degree—someone does have to be keeping an eye on things—but it's complicated by sizable inequities across the org. _Most_ people have no on-call rotation, many others have a token rotation that’s ~never used, and only a handful of teams have rotations that are quite bad. Management has extricated themselves completely. Things have been angling slowly worse. In a gambit to prioritize uptime over engineer time, we have more alarms, tighter tolerances, and a larger operation that generates more tail problems. Good for users, but not so good for us. Being able to sleep fully through the night is increasingly rare. There are some false positives, but most are not, and not easily fixed by more engineering. Expected time to response has lowered to low single digits—theoretically, you should not be exercising or driving if you’re on. The scheme works because many engineers are in their 20s and willing to soak up pain like a sponge. Rotations tend to smaller over time as single people make backroom deals to get out, and new blood is added too slowly. I’m not trying to get myself out, but want to effect some kind of change. IMO compensation or extra time off would be ideal—not only is it a nod to the cost of on-call, but it also make exchanging shifts easier by adding incentive beyond simple goodwill. The company could easily afford it, but probably doesn’t want to pay for what it can get for free. I have frequent conversations with my manager and get token “yeah, we’re looking into it”s, but it’s obviously not a priority for anyone up the chain. Has anyone else been in a similar position? Are you paid? What did you do? Suck it up? Leave?