On call allowances

[shaunbhoy]

Our place offer £25 a weeknight just for being on-call, with £35 for saturday and £50 for sundays and bank holiday. £210 for the week even if you get no calls.

If you DO get called then every hour is at time-and-a-half with double time for sundays and bank holidays.

Can become quite lucrative IF you get plenty of callouts, but naff if you don't get called (unless you are looking for an excuse to cut back on boozing maybe).

[milanbenes]

the best oncall I ever had was

25% of hourly rate for on-call period + 200% of hourly rate for time spent answering and solving calls

that was a nice earner

Milan.

[chopper]

https://blog.hinterlands.org/2010/07...n-oncall-rota/

Sysadmins should only participate in the rota after they have completed their probationary period. Think of the goal of the probation period as being getting someone up to speed so they can participate.

Each oncall shift should last one week, and rotate at 2.00pm on Tuesday. If you run a late shift, i.e. 11.00am to 8.00pm, make the person on that shift also be oncall. Get all the unsociable hours out of the way in one lump.

The bare minimum gap between oncall shifts should be 5 weeks. If your rota is shorter than this, then you don’t have enough qualified staff to cope with holidays, illness, paternity/maternity leave etc anyway.

The oncall shift should be mapped at least 3 months into the future. Staff should be free to swap oncall weeks providing that no-one is ever oncall two weeks in a row, and that all swaps are cleared with their line manager.

Issue the oncaller with a good quality mobile phone and 3G capable laptop. The phone should not be a smartphone, the aim should be for maximum battery life and talk time. The laptop should be more like a netbook than a desktop replacement, should come with a spare battery, and should dual boot to Windows and a useful Linux desktop distro. These days I’d shell out for a nice big SSD to stick in it too. Make sure there are no restrictions on international calling and no data caps for the phone and 3G card.

Don’t give the direct number of the oncall phone. Instead, use an answering service as filter. During office hours, the answering service should redirect enquiries to the regular helpdesk/support number. Out of hours, the answering service should accept calls, take details and then pass these on to the oncall number. Additionally this service should text and email call details so there’s a record.

Pay a fixed daily amount for being oncall. Pay 1.5 times this amount for being oncall on weekend days. Pay 2 times this amount for being oncall on a public holiday. Where someone is oncall on a public holiday, add one day to their holiday allowance.

Pay a per-incident fee when oncall is used. Each oncall use should be tracked in your ticketing system. Make using oncall a business cost, thus giving the business a reason to make sure oncall is not used trivially, and a reason to make sure problems are fixed permanently and not just temporarily alleviated.

When the oncall person has dealt with out of hours issues, don’t expect them in at the regular time the next day. Expect them to use their judgement to make sure they are suitably rested. You do not want an overly tired oncaller dealing with problems on production systems.

The person oncall should never be taking on “out of hours” work. Want a database dumped and reloaded? Want a disk unmounted and fscked overnight when a server’s not busy? All those things can be done, but not by the oncall person. That person is there to respond to problems, not to perform routine or planned maintenance.

Make it very clear that abuse of oncall is unacceptable. Oncall is there to fix customer or service affecting problems, not to help someone with Excel.

Have a clear demarcation between production and testing/development/QA systems. The latter group are not oncall’s responsibility to fix.

If you have offices around the world, have a “follow the sun” oncall system, get your offices to cover each other.

Have realistic expectations of oncall response times. If you need to guarantee that problems are attended to within 20-30 minutes then you should be running an overnight shift, not oncall.

Expect a daily report summarising the previous 24 hour oncall period, even if that report is “Nothing to report”. The weekend period could be lumped together on the Monday.

Have a weekly oncall handover meeting between the outgoing and incoming oncall staff.

During the day, have a junior or trainee sysadmin be oncall. It’s good practice for them.

[LondonManc]

It isn't in PC's case

There's clearly MoO as he seems obliged to stay.

[northernladuk]

They might already be inside IR35; for what sounds like a support role, I'd presumed that was a given....

It isn't in PC's case

[Agent]

They might already be inside IR35; for what sounds like a support role, I'd presumed that was a given....

Yeah, most of the time they'll be inside IR35 or permanent.

[LondonManc]

You factoring in the move from the contractors move from outside to inside IR35?

They might already be inside IR35; for what sounds like a support role, I'd presumed that was a given....

[northernladuk]

You factoring in the move from the contractors move from outside to inside IR35?

[Chuck]

I believe my client pays one hour per day for being on-call. If you get called, the first hour comes out of the paid hour, then you can start to charge at your standard rate.

For the intrusion that being on-call has on your life, and for what I consider an insulting level of compensation, I don't do on-call. Luckily, there are enough people on my team who do want to do it.

[Agent]

Depends on the hours. If it's night calls, I'd say £50-100 per night depending on the level of contractor, plus double pro-rata day rate for actual work done.

That seems pretty reasonable, they're well below this at the moment, paying £15 for a week day, £20 for Sat, £30 for a Sunday plus time and a half. I'm not sure if theres a minimum of hours paid irrespective of hours worked but that also seems reasonable.

[Agent]

My clientco pays £3 per hour. + £75 bonus for bank holidays. Workdays come to £45 a day and weekends £72.

Anything less wouldn't be worth the hassle of being on edge. Plus no drinkies

Thanks Loaf, so you get a minimum of £45 for a work day plus the £3 p/hour?

[LondonManc]

My clientco pays £3 per hour. + £75 bonus for bank holidays. Workdays come to £45 a day and weekends £72.

Anything less wouldn't be worth the hassle of being on edge. Plus no drinkies

What about when you actually get a call - is it double time per hour?

[SeededLoaf]

My clientco pays £3 per hour. + £75 bonus for bank holidays. Workdays come to £45 a day and weekends £72.

Anything less wouldn't be worth the hassle of being on edge. Plus no drinkies

[LondonManc]

Depends on the hours. If it's night calls, I'd say £50-100 per night depending on the level of contractor, plus double pro-rata day rate for actual work done.

[Agent]

A client of mine has asked for some guidance on how much they should be paying for their support teams 'on call allowance'

Can anyone offer some advice on the current market rates as this isn't an area that I do a huge amount of work in. this would typically be for helpdesk (all levels). Not sure how much industry sector will impact this, they are in the engineering sector and based outside of London.

At the moment, they pay a fixed amount for the days that you are on call plus time and a half if you are actually called upon.

Other organisations that I've dealt with have paid a flat £2k - £4k per year for being on call with nothing else on top.

Any input gratefully received.