hey lovers

so my work wants to bring in 24/7 support at work with us desktop gimps being on call.

was wondering if any of you do this currently, or in the past and how they worked out the pay?? flat rate?? per call?? mixture??

any info is good, thanks !

My just job (photobox.co.uk) introduced a 24/7 production environment, and 24/7 support.

Althought we wrote escalation procedures ect... ie only call support on mission critical errors they would still call. Production had a lot of Polish ect unskilled labour so again, it was a nightmare.

Work paid us f*** all to do it, it was more out of "good faith". But then, bosses would get angry if you didnt do it, or where a bit hostle to staff that called up laughing at 3am. Company was turning over £2million + a month and still too tight to pay us properly for it, so i left the comapny (and 5 others have left after me in the last 3 months)

Hope this is of some help?

On call is included in my pay but i'm lucky to get 1 call a month.

Where I used to work they would get $500 for a week of on call.

yer, im on call 24/7 52 weeks a year

lucky its all pretty relaxed

earns me 5g after tax, a laptop, mobile and all my calls, and i get vpn (finally) access to work

some months, no calls, other months, lots of calls at 3 in the morning when some disk fills up

i dont have any dumb conditions of having to respond to call within any time period

Current job I'm semi on call. We're a 9-5 Mon-fri shop so outside of hours it's a case of tough titties and it can wait until the next business day. However I've setup Nagios to SMS me if one of the important servers (VPN, Email, etc) are down since we still have people that work after hours. I've done this off my own back though since I'd rather get an alert and fix the problem in 5 mins then have someone else who earns the company money (IT typically burns cash) twiddling their thumbs instead of writing code / making sales presentations / etc.

I don't get extra for it but that's no biggie since my salary is full of phat lewts and I think the occasionally disruption is more than enough of a sacrifice to maintain a well oiled machine and to keep the employees happy. It helps to bolster relations and ties with those business units and they can see value in you & your job.

If they did want to make me oncall officially then it would cost them some coin. I'd expect $500/mth to be on call and then double time with a minimum of 2hrs for any incident.

In previous jobs I've been paid $500/wk + 10% of your salary for that week to be on call but it was a f***ing scam considering we'd do 80+hrs/week on call.. it was more like a night shift than being on call. In the job before that it was $300/mth + 2xHourly rate.

An oncall allowance really depends on the services you provide, the type of work the company does and a bunch of other factors - so there is no hard and fast rule. Work out what you think is fair and then add 10%.

ah epic, you situation sounds exactly like mine.

Initially it was sold to us as a "best effort". This means if you can answer the call, please do, try not to plan for big weekends away where you cant have computer / remote access in a decent amount of time. As there were five of us, it was a 1 in 5 week on call. We were paid $95 before tax ($65 after tax) for being on call, plus time and a half for any calls we took (minimum 15 minutes per call). This was fine for a while as we were only getting 3 odd calls a week not far out of normal hours.

Then we started taking on larger clients with high numbers of users that could call at any time and really did expect someone to answer the phone 24/7. One is a nursing place that has a shift change at 4am which is when the nurses come in, see the previous person hadn't logged off and now the pc is locked. They would call for a session (citrix) reset.

Suddenly best effort changed to you must answer it, every time, and have immediate access to pc / internet. This basically meant no going out period, no gym, no shopping, no movies, no weekends away, no nothing. We argued the changes and finally got the rate doubled, to 200 before tax (bout 130-140 after tax) but still is crappy.

We know we still getn screwed, but its changing again as clients expect someone to logon and fix issue straight away (as this is what is sold to them as part of support agreement), not get some person who is half asleep that will take 15-20 minutes to boot up laptop, connect vpns, then rdp, then look for the issue.

My advice, push for as much $$ as possible or recommend them getting a proper helpdesk where the person is working nights. Oncall sucks man, trust me. I would ask for 300 before tax, when they say no, say thats cheap as you are asking me to put my life on hold for 7 days with no anything (all the stuff above). Trust me, they will be selling the service at a premium rate, no reason you cant have a good chunk of that, your doing most of the work.

Let me know how you go, will give me ammo when our review comes again.

Grimy - check PM.

Federal public servants get the following:

10% per hour on call
4 hour minimum call out

Not being a public servant, an IT contractor friend of mine who works for federal government gets:

12.5% per hour while on-call
3 hour minimum call out
phone calls in 15 minute increments
can't charge for another 3 hours if re-called out in the same block of hours

So, assuming you are working 8 hour days and so are on-call the other 16 hours, you get 2 hours per day for being on call week days, and 3 hours for weekends and public holidays (assuming you aren't at work on these days). It's basically 16 hours a week for being on call.


last edited by natslovR at 22:02:53 18/Sep/07