As someone who has been in this industry for a long time and seen a lot, this still baffles me.

Who agrees to being on call 24/7 for a week? Especially when you are getting paid a typical professional salary? It seems absurd. I've always been active after hours and willing to jump in when things happen.

But this idea that you are essentially working (since you need to always be somewhere you can start working within minutes) for a week out of a month every month of your life for a salary job with no equity or long term payoff on the other end, has to be the most bizarre choice a person could make.

Maybe there is something to that I don't understand? I guess if you don't have any other interests or people in your life. But that just seems really sad.

Possibly someone who does this could help me to understand this a little better?

I've been on call most of my working life. When I worked at reddit, I was on call 24/7/365. The only time I wasn't on call was for the weekend of my wedding.

When I got to Netflix, only being on call one week a month was a drastic improvement. It meant that I could plan my vacations and important family events around not being on call. On the flip side, my family understood if I suddenly got up from dinner to take a call or get out my laptop. My on call schedule was shared with the family so we could all plan accordingly. Sometimes when it was my week and I had something really important, I would ask a coworker to cover that night for me, and then do the same for them in the future.

The salary for the position accounted for this inconvenience, and it wasn't a surprise. Since everyone who does SRE has this same responsibility, it's built into the compensation. Some companies actually give you extra money when you are on call (I hear Google is one of them).

Yeah, it kinda sucks from a family perspective, but it is what it is. As long as you set expectations with everyone around you, it's not that big a deal.

As it turned out at Netflix, since I was the lead, it meant that I was the secondary or tertiary on call at all times, but again, the family knew this, and also, my coworkers knew that if I didn't answer it was because I really really couldn't take the call at that time, and everyone was fine with that. It just rolled up to next person. Only the first on call was expected to answer, all the rest of us were on a "it would be great if you could" basis.

I do call one week in 10. I typically have between one and three out-of-hours pages during this time. A typical page takes 20 minutes to deal with, although sometimes they do take longer.

30-minute response time means I can still do things like skiing or hiking during on-call weekends, if I'm a bit creative.

As a result of doing call, my team's product runs reliably and meets its SLA requirements, allowing my company to sell the product to other serious companies and therefore for my job to exist.

I get paid around $4k for each week of this (on top of my normal salary). It is worth it for me.

I have "other interests and people in my life", including a girlfriend, friends, outdoor adventuring. One week in ten hardly affects anything, and I can usually trade with a teammate if I want to go away a particular week. Most of my friends have their own careers which make far more onerous demands on their lives for less compensation (doctors, lawyers, nurses, restaurateurs).

Our company introduced this last year. The reactions ranged from "the fuck you think I'm going to do this" to "you bunch of whiners, when I did Ops I was on call 25/8/370 for $0". The way teams implemented it ranged from "you have that week to work on whatever you want/not show up" to "well we don't expect any out of hours calls so we won't implement anything except a roster". It's been fascinating.

Going on 25 years now of being oncall. It's very, very good incentive to make sure the systems are optimized and working nicely.

I get a page about once a month, maybe. Because I do my job.

This.

Automate well enough and you almost never get called.

> Who agrees to being on call 24/7 for a week? Especially when you are getting paid a typical professional salary? It seems absurd. I've always been active after hours and willing to jump in when things happen.

That's called being on-call 24/7 for the entire span of your job.

I agree with all of your examples - it is discrimination if an employer says "your family will get in the way of you working off hours."

What I find obnoxious, though, is when an employer has standard rules for everyone (e.g. "all prospective applicants must produce a 3 hour at home project as part of the interview process") and then balk at "discrimination" because you'd rather spend your time at your kid's soccer game.

This also strikes me as the height of white-collar privilege, because there are tons of other jobs (e.g. military jobs, oil rig workers, construction jobs, etc.) that require a hell of a lot more family sacrifice, but it's mainly highly paid software developers that protest so much at a couple hour non-9-5 project.

The challenge with substantial take home tests is that they have the potential skew your applicant pool in a number of ways that are not ideal for your business.

Firstly, as a general rule of thumb, the very best developers who are in the highest demand are unlikely to jump through the hoops, so immediately you're filtering out the very best applicants. As a business owner, that's not something I want to do.

Secondly, and equally importantly, you are likely to get more, young financially stable people with less outside of work commitments (including families which naturally correlate with age which in turn correlates with experience).

If you want to over-index on people with less experience and at the same time reduce the number of applications from people for whom the time commitment is problematic (including but not limited to females who statistically take on a disproportionate percentage of child care responsibilities and some members of traditionally under represented minorities) all you do is reduce the likely diversity of talent you might otherwise get to pick from for your dev team.

>...the very best developers who are in the highest demand are unlikely to jump through the hoops...

I think that this applies for the best anything but, conversely, companies still want them to jump through the hoops. You need to convince the company you're a worthwhile hire and the company, in all of it's arrogance and self-righteous glory, spends little to no effort convincing you its a worthwhile place to work[0].

You see this in questions like, "So, why do you want to work here?" If we're pointedly blunt, we could just say, "You're hiring for 'x', I can do 'x'; also, I like having money versus not having it," but that would be taken as arrogant and/or "not be a team player" or "not very interested in the company or the role".

Let's face it: The world is filling itself with the "drink the kool-aid" types and, so, companies use that as a gatekeeper, so to speak. "A good company fit." "We just want to see if you're a fit for the company."

An experienced <x> is probably far less concerned with the pointless fact 'y' of your company versus, say, the company's culture or if you have matching contributions. If they've put in the time to make themselves an industry expert in something, then - of course - they're going to be a good company fit, at the end of the day. You're just looking for people who will be acquiescent and/or will jump through the hoops. ...but why...? For an entry-level position, I can understand it. For someone who's dev'ed for the last 10 years at 'zed' company, what function does that hurdle hope to accomplish, if not the aforementioned?

[0]-Not really true for Europe, though, so thank feck for that, but have seen it in the states.

> You see this in questions like, "So, why do you want to work here?" If we're pointedly blunt, we could just say, "You're hiring for 'x', I can do 'x'; also, I like having money versus not having it," but that would be taken as arrogant and/or "not be a team player" or "not very interested in the company or the role".

I've never failed in taking the latter approach in any interview I've ever faced. (I've been rejected; that's different).

I tend to think this is more about whether you're... 'politically risk-averse', for lack of better terminology.

Almost all of the companies that have found a "real" response to that sort of question bad (e.g. given me the gasp or whatever) have been drone-shops. To some extent it was a sort of 'soft-reject' on my side. A minority in any case.

Maybe one day it'll hurt me. I'm not sure. I think it's a pretty good filter against working with dickheads.

I am in Europe, mind. For a month or so at least. ;)

I work 10 hours a day, my wife does as well, and we start at substantially different times. We have a child who can stay up until 11.

If I'm doing multiple interviews (which everyone should be doing) and each requires 3 hours of my time (generous underestimate) then what am I going to do? Hire a sitter for a potential job for each of these companies?

Give me whiteboarding interviews -- at least the studying is cross applicable.

Last time I went interviewing, that’s exactly what I did for the take home projects: hire a sitter.

When you're looking at $60 an interview and looking at probably 10+ interviews to find a good fit then why am I going to spend $600 when I can brush up on information that I already know from school and work at a fraction of the cost?

It’s a place you want to work? I’ve never done more than 3 interviews in a go, but I also only apply to jobs I really want.

Because that's absurd when I can just apply to companies that have reasonable hiring practices that aren't effectively lock in.