Ask HN: Any luck negotiating better terms for on-call?
At big companies, it should be possible to have enough engineering offices to staff oncall with normal 8 hour days.  (8 hours in Tokyo, 8 hours in London, 8 hours in San Francisco, or similar.)<p>At startups, it&#x27;s harder; you simply can&#x27;t have 3 dev teams on 3 continents, so someone is going to have to be around at night.  The balance we found at the company I work at is that you are oncall Thursday-Thursday and get Friday off.  (Not &quot;not oncall&quot;, but &quot;don&#x27;t show up&quot;.) This seems fair to me; the free vacation day is really nice!  (We&#x27;re hiring!  <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pachyderm.io&#x2F;careers&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pachyderm.io&#x2F;careers&#x2F;</a>)<p>When I was at Google, I worked on Fiber and we didn&#x27;t have a dev presence around the world, so we had to be oncall after hours.  We had a dedicated operations team with people paid to be at work during strange hours, as you&#x27;d expect from an ISP, but some issues were escalated to the dev team, and we had to be around for those.  I was also the TL for a monitoring system that informed operations of outages, so my team would need to be around to handle monitoring monitoring ;)  We just got paid extra for every hour we were oncall, I remember it being something like $1600 per week, but I forget the exact number.  I was happy with this arrangement.    Other people weren&#x27;t, and weren&#x27;t asked to be oncall, and it didn&#x27;t count against them in any way.  It all seemed fair to me.