Just to confirm: Are you suggesting engineers working during work hours on an alert should get paid double? Or only outside work hours?
I'm not sure we're all on the same page here but let me give you an example of how on-call essentially works on my team.
- Week long rotations spread out across the year among members.
- On-call means holding a pager but also taking in any non-urgent requests that can be handled within a reasonable time. New feature requests are out of scope, answering a bug report from support is in scope, including a fix if that's possible.
- Responding to paging alerts only at night. On some teams we did have sister teams in other regions to cover with their on-call over some portion of the night.
- Generally, paging alerts are rare enough (once or twice a week) so out of work hours disruption is fairly low.
- Non-urgent breakages, bug reports, etc. are fairly common though.
Someone has to handle all that so it's a rotation. I don't think providing incentives to engineers to take more on-call is practical. Unless you are okay with them stagnating in their career. And it's the EM asking here so I'd hope they didn't want that.
I'm not sure we're all on the same page here but let me give you an example of how on-call essentially works on my team.
- Week long rotations spread out across the year among members.
- On-call means holding a pager but also taking in any non-urgent requests that can be handled within a reasonable time. New feature requests are out of scope, answering a bug report from support is in scope, including a fix if that's possible.
- Responding to paging alerts only at night. On some teams we did have sister teams in other regions to cover with their on-call over some portion of the night.
- Generally, paging alerts are rare enough (once or twice a week) so out of work hours disruption is fairly low.
- Non-urgent breakages, bug reports, etc. are fairly common though.
Someone has to handle all that so it's a rotation. I don't think providing incentives to engineers to take more on-call is practical. Unless you are okay with them stagnating in their career. And it's the EM asking here so I'd hope they didn't want that.