The subject of compensation for developers oncall comes up from time to time.

It can be difficult to find public examples of compensation structures to use.

These notes are from a quick survey of existing stuff I could find via discussions in opsy chats, the Internet, and direct questions to my network.

Asking questions

First, for those on the job hunt, a list of questions to ask about oncall, gathered from the Irish Tech Community:

  • Do you compensate being oncall (i.e. value the stress) or just when you get called (bullshit) or never (warning sign)?
  • What is the response time? Is it 5 mins (no life), 15-30 mins (some life, depending on if you have kids), or an hour (you can go to the cinema with your laptop)?
  • What percentage of your time is operations, when you’re oncall?
  • How many people are in the rotation? If < 6, is there a realistic plan in place to fix that?
    • You need at least 4 people for a reasonable shift pattern, plus one for maintenance (e.g. holidays) + one for emergency (e.g. attrition).
  • Is there one person oncall in a shift or is it a primary/secondary kind of thing?

Notes from the ‘net

Second, some posts that cover oncall compensation in various detail:

Example structures

Finally, a set of example compensation structures from various companies.

A fintech company in south America:

  • If you are oncall but not working, +33% of equivalent hourly rate.
  • Paged and start working, +300% of your hourly for that period.
  • Some more extras for nights or weekends.
  • They just exported data from Pagerduty: time working was acknowledgement → resolution.
  • People would not resolve until they were finished any report or comms work that had to be done out-of-hours.
  • This apparently was just how labour laws in that country apply - works the same way for doctors.

A medium-sized SaaS company operating across US / EU:

  • Time off as standard if you actually get paged out of hours: ½ day per four hours or part thereof in responding.
  • Comp at 25% for oncall time regardless.
  • Comp → 100% for the time you’re responding.
  • Because of how their shift structure works, this all tends to amount to roughly a 10% lift in salary, plus time to recover.

A large multinational:

  • Some teams have business-hours only shifts for internal infra APIs.
  • Other teams have customer-facing services and much stricter on-call.
  • Those latter get paid per shift, get a mifi, and get time off etc.
  • ^ didn’t get exact comp structure here.

Another large multinational:

  • Three tiers of oncall, depending on pager SLA.
  • Tier 1: >= 99.9% availability SLA, 5min pager response SLA.
    • Comp paid at ⅔ for outside hours
    • That is, outside business hours accrue hours at 2h for every 3h oncall.
  • Tier 2: >= 99.9% availability SLA, > 5min but <= 15min pager response SLA.
    • Comp paid at ⅓ for outside hours.
    • That is, outside business hours accrue hours at 1h for every 3h oncall.
  • Tier 3: everything else, not comped.
  • Mon-Fri comp paid outside 9-6 core hours. Sat & Sun all comped.
  • So if you were oncall 6am-6pm Mon-Sun that’d be like
  • 3 x 5h for Mon-Fri
  • 2 x 12h for Sat-Sun
  • So 39h compensatable, converting into pay as 13h at tier 2 or 26h tier 1.
  • You could take this as either time in lieu (at 8h/day) or cash (pro-rated to salary).

A medium-sized SaaS multinational:

  • Shifts are either weekday or weekend.
  • Pay according to 60h week (hourly equiv. from salary) if weekday shift.
  • According to 40h week + 24h if weekend shift.
  • Payout doubles if schedule includes public/bank holidays.
  • Contact there mentioned this was very similar to structure in last job, another similar-sized SaaS.

Intercom’s oncall implementation:

  • Former Ruby monolith sharded out over the last few years into services. Heavy on AWS and running less software.
  • An unusual structure, but interesting: specifically because they have modified their approach to avoid having “too many people/teams oncall”.
  • Virtual team, volunteers from any team in the org.
  • 6-month rotations in that virtual team, having taken a handful of shifts.
  • Oncall went from being spread across more than 30 engineers to just 6 or 7.
  • “We put in place a level of compensation that we were happy with for taking a week’s worth of on call shifts.”
    • Not sure of precise structure, presumably a bonus per week oncall.

Criteo, medium-sized Adtech HQ’d in France. This is from a 3y old Reddit thread:

  • SREs are oncall. Pager response time is 30 minutes. (!)
  • They are paid for oncall for nights/weekends etc. Exact comp unspecified.
  • If you are paged, you get comped time as well in exchange (½ day at least).
  • Internet & phone bill reimbursed for oncall engineers.
  • If you work during the night, you have to stay home until you get 11h consecutive rest (French law).