What is an acceptable on-call agreement between employee and employer?

IT is full of heroics; many of us carry a paging device, like Batman waiting in his cave for the Bat Signal. What's a fair compensation for on-call schedules? Is it acceptable to handle emergency requests on weekends or vacations?

Seems like this would depend entirely on the individual and the workplace...

I work at an e-commerce company, and the website needs to be up 24x7, which means someone in the admin group is also on call 24x7. We rotate being on call for a week between 4 people... the number of calls can vary from 0 calls for the week (rare), to getting virtually no sleep for the entire week (also rare). Usually it's a few early AM pages of varying severity, but for that week the on call guy is basically chained to a laptop & sleeps with his cell phone.

Compensation here comes in the form of a flexible work schedule, being able to take personal days as needed, great management & an enjoyable workplace. Personally, I just consider being on call to be a necessary evil that comes with this particular position, and I think the perks are worth the stress. Then again, quite a few would say it's not even close to being worth it.

People's expectations would probably depend on business hours, the importance of the systems to the business, and both tangible & intangible benefits provided by the employer.

For me, this depends 100% on expectation. If the employer is completely up-front about this, they're going to keep (and deserve to keep) employees. It needs to be brought up during the interview, and if the reality doesn't match up to the picture they painted, you need to document, and bring it to your review. You agreed on a salary based on faith that they fully disclosed the company's demands on your personal time.

You're not going to be able to change business needs. The only real use for this information is as leverage for salary bumps.

Vacation is a different story, in my book. If I have a stand-in, and I've documented properly, there's no excuse for calling me. It's not actually a vacation unless my phone is off. I've helped shape this expectation by bending over backward to keep coworkers from being called on their own vacations.

The real answer is to be 100% clear on what your limits are in the interview. It's ok with me if that costs me a job that would make me unhappy.

IMO, in a larger environment it should be a combination of off-shift staff (typcially entry-level), paid oncall for most technical staff and unpaid oncall for senior technical staff.

That sets up an environment that is healthy:

• The technical staff needs to document stuff so the off-shift people can take care of routine things
• The mainstream technical staff is fairly compensated and not getting paged 3 times a week
• The senior technical staff has a disincentive to hold knowledge too close, as they will be woken up if they do.

One thing that's important to take into account is "on call" v.s. "state of readiness" (call 'em what you will) when considering just compensation.

The way I differentiate between them is basically by figuring out what I'm allowed to do. For me, I feel an added 10-20% salary is fine if I'm expected to carry the pager and handle/redirect any incoming issues.

For the above, I can reasonably expected to be allowed to drink a beer or two, with a on-site time of an hour or two. I.e., be allowed to have a social life.

If I'm expected to be on-site in five minutes, keeping a constant watch on systems (despite having alarmsystems), I'd most likely shoot for 200-300% daily salary, with a one week rotation.

It can be difficult to get the second version approved, and so my favorite is a bit of a hybrid system.

I generally know my systems well enough that problems don't occur, so I'm happy with 10-20% pager bonus, but on the occasions an issue does occur, I want fair compensation i.e., per-ticket compensation.

How much that compensation is is up to you and your boss, obviously, but a few of the "soft" parts of the package I like to include are: * Guaranteed time to FIX the problem v.s. WORKING AROUND IT. * Flex time (while it's true that I'd be compensated for any issues, getting in at 8am or 9am after staying up until 4am is hardly productive).

Another great thing is reviewing cases. Even if it just looks like a one-time issue, other people on your team may very well have useful input, and the review process itself (no, not just a incident report, but an actual honest-to-god face-to-face meeting with your team and your boss) will help you stay proactive rather than reactionary.

A quick example would be noticing that a server had a disk fill up overnight (possibly despite having been 30% free the evening before).

The reactionary thing to do would be to investigate and clean up whatever went wrong, as well as write up an incident report. The proactive thing to do would be to investigate and clean up whatever went wrong, write up the incident report, plan a look-over on the remaining servers, order new hardware etc.

As a sidenote, that last part fits in very well with the "Guaranteed time" I mentioned earlier.

This can vary widely between employers and environments. Where I'm currently at, we're expected to be on call, but only when it is our turn in the rotation. Our work schedule is pretty flexible, so if you're up late the night before because of an issue, you can usually come in late the next day or even work from home. I agree with Kara Marfia that this is something that needs to be agreed upon in advance, and that things should be spelled out pretty plainly, both what they expect and what you expect.

One thing that makes our system a bit better is that we have a Network Operations Center that is staffed with pretty bright people. They can usually resolve issues that are well-documented without needing to page or call.