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If the engineers aren’t oncall, who is? Is it okay to exploit non-engineers? If anything, it is less exploitative to have those who are empowered to improve their situation oncall.


Given that the parent comment is clear about the problem being the 24x7 expectation: Someone paid to work or be available that shift, engineer or not?


There are too many variables and factors involved really.

Is someone covering the full 24 hours, or is it just out of hours?

Are they under a one week in X rota, or expected to be permanently available?

Are they expected to cover anything/everything, or are they just the escalation point for their specialist area?

What other support is available? (i.e. if the shit really hits the fan, are you left to deal with it alone?)

On average, how many times are callouts expected? There's a big difference between half a dozen times a week and half a dozen times a year.

How are the extra duties remunerated/compensated? Is there time off in lieu?

There's a massive spectrum there ranging from hugely unpleasant and not worth the money to not particularly onerous and helpful extra cash/time off.


No, they said “normal office hours” are for engineers. Someone needs to take the other shifts.


Our support folks handle the on-call support. They do one week each on rotation, they get some extra compensation and the following friday off.

If it's a serious issue they can't handle they might wake up one of us programmers, but usually they can find some temporary fix or workaround until the next morning.


Do permanent fixes get applied or do the mitigations just get re-applied again and again?

Are the support folks considered engineers?




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