On Call Compensation
Gregg M Doherty
readers of this group may be able to help me.
I am a UNIX network administrator and am currently in negotiations with my
company over off-hour on-call support (24/7). Their offer was quite laughable
but I am interested in how other companies have dealt with this situation (per
diem, % of salary, other).
PLease respond directly. If this type of posting belongs elsewhere, please
let me know.
Thanks in advance.
Gregg Doherty (gre...@world.std.com)
Network Administator
SilverPlatter Information, Inc
James E Myers
usually equivalent to the off-shift premium (about 5%) or so. I can't give
TI's policy, this is strictly from my experience when I did consulting. Of
course, there were penalty and response-time obligations that the on-call
person had to meet or face losing the bonus.
--
\////
(o)^(o)
================================oooO=(_)=0ooo================================
| _/_/_/_/_/ _/_/ _/_/ Jim Myers |
| _/ _/ _/_/ _/ Texas Instruments Inc. |
| _/ _/ _/ _/ jmy...@mksol.dseg.ti.com |
| _/ _/ __ _/ _/ __ |
| _/_/ /_/ _/ _/ /_/ Opinions_expressed != Texas_Ins_Inc|
=============================================================================
Phil Scarr
Gregg M Doherty <gre...@world.std.com> wrote:
>Please excuse the non-technical nature of this question, but I believe that
>readers of this group may be able to help me.
>
>I am a UNIX network administrator and am currently in negotiations with my
>company over off-hour on-call support (24/7). Their offer was quite laughable
>but I am interested in how other companies have dealt with this situation (per
>diem, % of salary, other).
>
>PLease respond directly. If this type of posting belongs elsewhere, please
>let me know.
>
The University of Virginia will pay $2/hour for on-call time, and
straight time for when you actually come in to do work. It sucks, but
there it is.
-Phil
--
===============================================================================
Phil Scarr, Computer Systems Engineer | Forget it, Jake, | pr...@Virginia.EDU
Neuroclinical Trials Center | it's Chinatown... | 804.243.0229 (v)
The University of Virginia | | 804.243.0294 (f)
===============================================================================
Gregory M. Paris
Gregg M Doherty <gre...@world.std.com> wrote:
>>Please excuse the non-technical nature of this question, but I believe that
>>readers of this group may be able to help me.
>>
>>I am a UNIX network administrator and am currently in negotiations with my
>>company over off-hour on-call support (24/7). Their offer was quite laughable
>>but I am interested in how other companies have dealt with this situation (per
>>diem, % of salary, other).
>>
>>PLease respond directly. If this type of posting belongs elsewhere, please
>>let me know.
pr...@brain.neuro.virginia.edu (Phil Scarr) writes:
>The University of Virginia will pay $2/hour for on-call time, and
>straight time for when you actually come in to do work. It sucks, but
>there it is.
>
> -Phil
I guess we were supposed to respond directly, but oh what the heck.
The offer here was for one hour of pay for every eight hours of
on-call. No extra pay if you come in, just "comp time". Supposedly
that plan was based on existing practice by peer companies here in the
Boston area. I don't think the policy ever got approved. Basically we
have no on-call status.
Personally, I'm happier saying, "Sorry I'm busy," to off-hours callers.
On-call stinks. Don't you already work enough hours?
Greg
--
Greg Paris <pa...@merlin.dev.cdx.mot.com>
Motorola Information Systems Group, 20 Cabot Blvd, Mansfield, MA 02048-1193
"Your Plastic Pal who's fun to be with." TM Sirius Cybernetics
These posts are self-disclamatory.
Todd Gilbert
pr...@brain.neuro.virginia.edu (Phil Scarr) wrote:
>
> The University of Virginia will pay $2/hour for on-call time, and
> straight time for when you actually come in to do work. It sucks, but
> there it is.
>
It sucks (relatively) if you're called in a lot. If you're never called
in, they're paying you $2 an hour to carry a beeper. Good deal.
evaluate the frequency at which you expect to get called in before
determining "appropriate" compensation. Or, see if you can get a pay
scale with several multiplier gradations depending on how many extra
hours you end up working.
This will require you convincing management that your time (and stress
levels) are worth the extra money. You might try some proactive work
to decrease future problems (i.e. chances they'll have to pay you overtime)
to show them you're not trying to blackmail them.
Regards
Todd
--
tgil...@salsa.abq.bdm.com The owls are not what they seem
or " @nacho.abq.bdm.com And neither are the penguins
Life is a LemminKeinin, and I want my money back
Thomas Sippel - Dau
In article <1994Jul5.2...@mksol.dseg.ti.com>, jmy...@mksol.dseg.ti.com (James E Myers) writes:
- Gregg, from my experience with a dozen or so companies, the on-call bonus is
- usually equivalent to the off-shift premium (about 5%) or so.
A few years ago similar subject were discussed and I thought I re-post the
summary posted then. - its lengthy - it almost fille up my paste buffer.
Article 3197 of comp.unix.admin:
Path: cc.ic.ac.uk!icdoc!uknet!mcsun!uunet!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!mips!atha!aunro!alberta!cpsc.ucalgary.ca!ajfcal!novatel!hpeyerl
From: hpe...@novatel.uucp (Herb Peyerl)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin
Subject: SUMMARY: Adminstrator on-call policies.
Message-ID: <1991Dec5.1...@novatel.uucp>
Date: 5 Dec 91 16:43:31 GMT
Organization: none
Lines: 822
Last week I asked other Sysadmins to provide a run-down of their
sites' on-call policies. I received 16 EMail responses of
which a few have requested that I keep the information ``FYI''
only (FMI?) so I will not be posting their responses in this
summary.
In terms of what ended up happening at this site:
Before this came down, we all carried our pagers on an as-is
basis. ie: if it went off, and all we were doing was watching
the dog lick it's privates, then we'd answer it. However, if
we were doing something more exciting, the pager would be
ignored. We were not being compensated for this (except if
we had to go on-site to solve the problem) and everything
was tickety-boo with us on that.
THEN we got a new manager-ess who took it upon herself to
make this a little more official because presumably, our
response was inadequate. This prompted us to raise our fur
and look to the net for help in dealing with this.
The solution is still baking in the oven right now but as
it stands it will be:
o Workstations, PCs, Macs and the like will remain
unsupported on off-hours.
o The Vaxen will only be supported in emergency-like
situations. (Flood, fire, power-failure, et'al).
o Support will only be provided on weekends including
stat holidays the fall on weekends. There will be
no formal support on weekdays.
o Compensation will be 2 hours O/T per day on call.
o If support person needs to go on-site to solve problem,
then 3 hours overtime will replace the 2 hours overtime
for standby.
o The 4 support people will rotate and share the burden
of supporting the Vaxen. If a problem comes up that
can not be solved by the vax-un-trained admins (Myself
and two others) then the Vax admin will be called
and if he's available (ie: watching the dog lick its
privates) then he'll respond.
Also, in the initial post, I asked for salary information and
some site info. I'm not sure if it's koshure to post people's
salaries to the net so I decided not to post that. Basically,
6 of the responses I received contained salary info that ranged
from $36,500.US <--> $60,000.AU (apparently, 60K Australian
works out to about $48k US). For everyone's interest, the four
carrion$ cat cdc/News/pagers
Article 3197 of comp.unix.admin:
Path: cc.ic.ac.uk!icdoc!uknet!mcsun!uunet!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!mips!atha!aunro!alberta!cpsc.ucalgary.ca!ajfcal!novatel!hpeyerl
From: hpe...@novatel.uucp (Herb Peyerl)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin
Subject: SUMMARY: Adminstrator on-call policies.
Message-ID: <1991Dec5.1...@novatel.uucp>
Date: 5 Dec 91 16:43:31 GMT
Organization: none
Lines: 822
Last week I asked other Sysadmins to provide a run-down of their
sites' on-call policies. I received 16 EMail responses of
which a few have requested that I keep the information ``FYI''
only (FMI?) so I will not be posting their responses in this
summary.
In terms of what ended up happening at this site:
Before this came down, we all carried our pagers on an as-is
basis. ie: if it went off, and all we were doing was watching
the dog lick it's privates, then we'd answer it. However, if
we were doing something more exciting, the pager would be
ignored. We were not being compensated for this (except if
we had to go on-site to solve the problem) and everything
was tickety-boo with us on that.
THEN we got a new manager-ess who took it upon herself to
make this a little more official because presumably, our
response was inadequate. This prompted us to raise our fur
and look to the net for help in dealing with this.
The solution is still baking in the oven right now but as
it stands it will be:
o Workstations, PCs, Macs and the like will remain
unsupported on off-hours.
o The Vaxen will only be supported in emergency-like
situations. (Flood, fire, power-failure, et'al).
o Support will only be provided on weekends including
stat holidays the fall on weekends. There will be
no formal support on weekdays.
o Compensation will be 2 hours O/T per day on call.
o If support person needs to go on-site to solve problem,
then 3 hours overtime will replace the 2 hours overtime
for standby.
o The 4 support people will rotate and share the burden
of supporting the Vaxen. If a problem comes up that
can not be solved by the vax-un-trained admins (Myself
and two others) then the Vax admin will be called
and if he's available (ie: watching the dog lick its
privates) then he'll respond.
Also, in the initial post, I asked for salary information and
some site info. I'm not sure if it's koshure to post people's
salaries to the net so I decided not to post that. Basically,
6 of the responses I received contained salary info that ranged
from $36,500.US <--> $60,000.AU (apparently, 60K Australian
works out to about $48k US). For everyone's interest, the four
of us here don't really come near the lower end of the scale in
even Canadian dollars which is really quite pathetic.
Following is a summary of the responses I received. Responses
have been edited for brevity.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
From: David Collier-Brown <dav...@nexus.yorku.ca>
|How much compensation is there for being on call?
Roughly 2.50C$/hr for a week (168 hrs, not 40)
|How often are you on call? (ie: do you share?)
Every 5 weeks
|If you share, is everyone cross-trained?
No, but we're good guessers
|Is there compensation for cancelled dinners, movies?
No, just money.
|What level of emergency must exist such that paging someone is an
| appropriate action. (ie: flood, fire, disk crash, terrorism,
| no disk space, no paper in laser printer, forgot password,
| how to delete line in ``vi'', etc......)
The backups don't work, something crashed and wouldn't reboot,
a system is hung/wedged/acting bizzarely...
|What is an adequate response time?
Within the hour.
|Who is allowed to page? (ie: security staff only, Applications support
| staff, users....etc....)
Only the operations supervisor.
York University, Systems Administrator, **K$C/year, 120-odd
timesharing servers, fileservers and central-lab workstations.
Enough equipment we have a field engineer in every week
fixing somebody's disk...
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Chris Keane <ch...@rufus.state.COM.AU>
>How much compensation is there for being on call?
I'm paid a "pager allowance" of $40 per day to carry the pager. If I'm paged
more than twice (for different problems) I'm paid an extra $20 per page. If
I have to go in to work, I'm paid a $50 callout fee + taxi fares.
>How often are you on call? (ie: do you share?)
I'm on call every week night, Friday nights until midnight.
I'm the only admin, so there's noone else to share with :-(
>If you do not share, how do you deal with not being available to
> provide support? (ie: you've been out drinking, you're having
> dinner with your fiance' and are currently on your knees
> proposing, etc, etc...)
Well, to answer: my pager allowance is supposed to compensate me for
not being able to get drunk on week nights, and I've learnt not to propose
to my fiance while on call. In short, the bank expects me to be able to
respond no matter what.
>Is there compensation for cancelled dinners, movies?
Sometimes I'm daring enough to go to a movie, and I've only been paged
in a movie once, but essentially, if I wish to take the risk and I do
get paged, then that's bad luck for me. I mean, the bank was paying me
to be available.
>What level of emergency must exist such that paging someone is an
> appropriate action. (ie: flood, fire, disk crash, terrorism,
> no disk space, no paper in laser printer, forgot password,
> how to delete line in ``vi'', etc......)
everything up to and including "no disk space" above. Essentially it boils
down to: Anything that the operator can't fix that needs to be.
>What is an adequate response time?
I need to respond to the initial page within five minutes. If I haven't
called in after this, I am paged again. If I still do not respond to the
page, I am called at home (or anywhere else that I've told the operators
that I might be). If I am still uncontactable, I have some pretty heavy
explaining to do the next day.
>Who is allowed to page? (ie: security staff only, Applications support
> staff, users....etc....)
Operations staff.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: [Some guy/gal who wanted to be anonymous.]
I'm not entirely sure what [XXXX]'s main computer support people do about
pagers and all that, but I can give you info about my lab. I'm not sure
of it will be all that useful since the lab is not really the same sort
of thing as your 100+ workstation facilities.
[Brief description of what hardware the lab had which due to it's nature
I've edited out due to the possibility that it may identify to poster to
his/her colleagues.]
There are about 150 researchers in the lab, and about 20 heavy users.
Because of the nature of our funding and the ongoing research, we keep the
lab up and running 24 hours a day, investigating problems as soon as they
are reported. Generally, the problems are found and solved by the staff
before the users notice, but I do carry an alpha numeric pager for when
problems occur and I'm not in the lab.
I'm the only one with a pager, there aren't any official policies about
when I must reply to the page. Anyone in the lab can page me at any time
from the command line, or by calling a pager number and leaving a return
number by touch tone.
I don't get any special compensation for carrying the pager, but it makes
life easier for me in the long run by letting me solve problems sooner before
they take down the whole lab.
We also have a system where the machines run periodic checks to make sure
that everything is running properly -- when things aren't, the computer sends
me a page explaining what's wrong (much nicer than trying to get a user to
explain what they were doing when "the computer broke").
so -- to sum up, there's one pager, I carry it. it's up to me to decided
if I'm going to answer a page or not. if I'm not up to working because I'm
out with my girlfriend or I'm eating dinner or whatever, I'll try to see if
the problem can wait until the next day before running to a modem.
if you have any specific questions, feel free to ask.
if you use this message in a netwide post, don't put my name on it since
this isn't any formalized lab policy. this is just to give you some info
about how pagers are being used in the sysadmin biz.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: dow...@umiacs.umd.edu (Race Dowling)
There is only one person on call at any given time, each person is responsible
for being sure he/she (there aren't any she's yet ;-() is reasonably sober and
not out of the general area during the assigned time.
>How much compensation is there for being on call?
When the beeper goes off, you call in. If the problem can be handled by phone
there is no charge (at least no one has charged us yet). If you go in, you get
paid a minimum of 3 hours OT.
>How often are you on call? (ie: do you share?)
One evening per week.
>If you share, is everyone cross-trained?
Training? What's that? - Get real, everybody wings it. ;^)
>What is an adequate response time?
However long it takes you to drive from home to work.
>Who is allowed to page? (ie: security staff only, Applications support
> staff, users....etc....)
Branch Chief or higher (i.e. anyone authorized to pay overtime).
>
>
>We'd appreciate any comments you may have on this. If possible, please
>provide your company name, position, and a brief list the sort of equip-
>ment you deal with. (Salary would be great too for another battle we're
>fighting but is not important.)
>
The trick to reducing your interruption rate is to make it fiscally painful
for someone to call you. Thus, the 3 hour rule works well, but please, GET IT
IN WRITING!
I am a Senior Scientist with an agency of the US Government, who has been
given the dubious honor of being a combination MIS and Sys Admin.
Our salaries for Sys admins range from 25 - 85K depending on the size of the
system and how much experience they have (the higher up sys admins usually
have a staff, so they are really more like MISs, the lower ones are really
like "key operators" of office equipment). I'd say, for a system of 35+ nodes
and 2 servers run by someone with more than 5 years experience who is
knowledgeable in c, ada, lisp and knows most of the Unix shells, you're
probably talking 50-60K (just a guess).
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: crac...@ai.mit.edu (Stuart Cracraft)
I would say having the compensation of a good job is enough; if you
try to wring a hole lot more out of them they might say "Gee, this
"Gang of Four" is really not our cup of tea."
And also, I am really surprised that 4 full time people are needed
for a network of your size. I don't know how old your equipment is
or what your users are like, but 4 people for the # workstations
you mentioned seems far too high.
Be careful! They may be thinking the above paragraph already!!
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[ The above response interested me because the 4 of us have enough trouble
keeping afloat with 6 Vaxen, 100+ workstations, 4 novell servers, 260 PC's,
and about 250 Mac's with total number of users about 1200 and 7 sites spread
around the world. Maybe we're just stupid but that seems like a bit of work
for 4 people. Maybe all Stuart does is backups, archives, and user accounts.
Incidentally, coming up with this policy was not our idea either. We just
didn't want to get the short end of the stick.]
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: i...@dollar.bf.rmit.OZ.AU (Ian Johnson CMIM)
Hi,
Here`s the deal that the company I work for has me on for pager
support.
Company: Colonial Mutual Life Australia
Position: UNIX System Administrator (and I'm the only one!)
Salary: $**,***
Machines: Pyramid, 2 Sun 3/60's, Solbourne, 150 TCP/IP networked PC's
I'm only 24hour support Monday thru Friday and on weekend support if needed.
CM pays $25/day Mon-Thur and $30 for Friday. If required for weekend
support you get an additional $40 per day. If paged and I ring back CM pay
on hours pay. If I have to attend on site all time is overtime and the
taxis are payed for. There is now compensation for any social
inconvience, I tried this when I told my boss that I just managed to get
Elle MacPherson back to my flat :-)
We have 24 hour operators and as the pagers aren`t alpha-numeric only
the operators can page someone. This way I only have to call one phone
number if I get paged. Other people (service desk or other programmers)
can request that I be paged. CM also provide me with PhoneCards which are
plastic cards that can be used in public phone boxes instead of change.
They were also kind enough (actually I insisted :-) to put a second phone
line into my house so I don't tie up the private line, and they pay all
the bills for that phone. A modem was also provided.
I'm the only person on support who knows about the UNIX system but if I
cannot be contacted the application programmers are contacted to see if
they can help. If that programmers can't help (99% of the time as they're
ex-cobol programmers and are mainly involved with Oracle) then the
Pyramid hotline is called.
Because we are fairly new UNIX site the operators tend to get quite panicy
about any console message and will page me. They have calmed down quite
alot now and will only ring if some sheduled job failed or terminal does
not respond.
The operators will ring the pager again if I don't respond in 15 minutes
and then will wait an additional 15 minutes before trying again and
then ring someone else.
The drawbacks are that the pager has a limited range (around 150km) which
means that you can't go to far on weekends etc. We now have a fulltime DBA
who will also act as my backup so if I wan't to go away I give him the pager
and he becomes first call.
However on the whole I think I get a fair deal. I hope answered all of
your questions. I think this setup is fairly typical of banking/financial
DP departments in Australia.
PS. All monies are in Oz dollars for what they're worth. I would be
interested in the salary info you collect because I'm trying to fight
a battle with our managers about salary. They believe that a UNIX admin
is not a specialised job and that would like to grow up and be a real
programmer one day. Shit the site was a mess when I came back after
spending 4 weeks in California attending Interop and LISA. From what I
gathered at LISA most admins with 5 yrs exp were getting around $40K US!!
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: rexago8!hc...@uunet.UU.NET (Beirne Konarski)
Intro:
I am not a system administrator per se, since we don't have any, but I am
responsible for our nationwide SNA network of UNIX machines and one big IBM.
How much compensation is there for being on call?
We are on salary so there is no monetary compensation. If the calls
become excessive we can cut the time out of our regular work time,
although it is up to the discretion of the project/group leader as we
do not have comp time.
How often are you on call? (ie: do you share?)
I only carry a pager when we are releasing new software to our field
sites. This normally lasts a few weeks, and I split the time with one
other programmer. Whoever is on call is expected to take all the
calls. When I don't have the pager I can still be called at any time,
although I am not required to be available. Usually if I am not
available the other programmer is.
If you do not share, how do you deal with not being available to
provide support? (ie: you've been out drinking, you're having
dinner with your fiance' and are currently on your knees
proposing, etc, etc...)
I just avoid those situations when I have the pager. If I don't have
the pager and am doing something important at home that I don't want to
be interrupted, I just don't answer the phone.
Is there compensation for cancelled dinners, movies?
No.
What level of emergency must exist such that paging someone is an
appropriate action. (ie: flood, fire, disk crash, terrorism,
no disk space, no paper in laser printer, forgot password,
how to delete line in ``vi'', etc......)
My area is our nationwide SNA network. I will get called if one of our
sites can't communicate with the General Office IBM and the help desk
operator can't fix the problem. They do try to judge the
importance of the problem on their own, and have rarely paged me with
stupid problems.
What is an adequate response time?
It has not been specifically defined. In practice about 15 minutes.
Who is allowed to page? (ie: security staff only, Applications support
staff, users....etc....)
Our users around the country call in to a help desk for first-level
support. They solve most problems and serve as a filter to protect us
from calls. Only the help desk can page us.
We'd appreciate any comments you may have on this. If possible, please
provide your company name, position, and a brief list the sort of equip-
ment you deal with. (Salary would be great too for another battle we're
fighting but is not important.)
Company: Summit Information Systems (sub. of Roadway Express)
Position: Technical Support Analyst (Like a programmer/analyst but on the
technical track)
Equipment: AT&T 3b1's and 3b2's
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: gas...@orion.inf.ethz.ch (Scott "gaspo" Gasparian)
Well, we don't carry pagers. I would especially fight against it if I were
you. Those little buggers cause more trouble thatn they are worth.
we have 2 people watching 250+ machines (sun,sequent,dec,etc..) and we do
ok. Then again, one of us usually pops by the office on saturday or
sunday.
I'd be interested in the replies you get. could you forward on
to me what you summarize?
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: are...@kong.gsfc.nasa.gov (Andrew Arensburger - RMS)
Disclaimer: I currently have a reasonably laid-back job, and if anyone were
to suggest that I should wear a beeper, I'd tell them to f*** off. At my
previous job, however, I did wear one, and there was talk of instituting
a grand on-call policy. Most of my answers are based on that.
In comp.unix.admin you write:
>How much compensation is there for being on call?
I don't wear a beeper. A friend of mine who does makes about $3000
more per year than I do. This strikes me as being about right (similar
jobs, almost equivalent experience).
>How often are you on call? (ie: do you share?)
At my last position, the idea was to have someone on call for a
week, after which we would rotate. At the time, this worked out to about
one week per month.
>If you share, is everyone cross-trained?
Yes.
>If you do not share, how do you deal with not being available to
>Is there compensation for cancelled dinners, movies?
See first question.
>What level of emergency must exist such that paging someone is an
Flood, fire, terrorism: "Don't call me, call 911."
No paper in laser printer, how to delete line in 'vi', etc: "Don't
call me, call the help desk."
This is something you need to work out for yourselves. Fires and
other disasters are something you should know about, even though you can't
do a thing about them (assuming you're a sysadmin and not a fireman).
No space on disk, printer out of paper, and other minor disasters
usually fall under the category of Things That Can Wait Until Monday. However,
it depends on the user's need: if the user wants to print out a piece of
code in order to make annotations while debugging, he can use another printer
or wait until Monday. If he needs to make the slides for the ultra-important
presentation tomorrow, this is an appropriate emergency.
If the user is out of disk space because he's got core files all over
the place and can't be bothered to remove them, that's not an emergency.
If he's out of space because he's simulating an n+1'th generation VLSI chip
and producing gigabytes of output >in the line of duty<, that's reasonable.
Obviously, if the response time on a machine is shot to hell because
there are 1700 /bin/sh jobs running :-), that's a reasonable emergency.
You need to decide how much you are willing to do for your users
outside of normal working hours: are you providing full-fledged support
24 hours a day, 7 days a week? Or are you putting out fires for those people
who happen to be working over the weekend?
>What is an adequate response time?
I would consider that half an hour to call back is adequate. Of course,
a lot of users will disagree.
>Who is allowed to page? (ie: security staff only, Applications support
> staff, users....etc....)
At the place where most of this happened, we had five or six net-
works of IBM PCs, including at least one that was available 24 hours a day.
This was in a student environment.
There was a help desk that could be called from any of the PC labs
between 8:00 a.m. and 8:00 p.m., Monday-Friday. They were in charge of
answering common questions ("How do I format a floppy disk?," "How do I use
WordPerfect?" and so forth). They called the sysadmins for any questions
or problems they couldn't handle, and had our beeper numbers.
In addition, most of the faculty had our beeper numbers.
So the answer is basically, two categories of people:
a) those who know enough not to call you without a reason
b) those who will make your life miserable if you're not at their
beck and call 24 hours a day.
Hope this helps.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
[I liked this guys hostname. Fellow pseudo-hop-head]
From: cd...@fuggles.utah.edu (Carlton Doe)
I'd be interested in what you get.
As for me, I'm the sole sys-admin/db administrator for a small company (<70
employees) with 4 CPUS and a fairly major phone switch (AT&T G-1 digital
switch). Users are on ascii terminals. We run an Informix On-Line environment
and am on-call constantly.
If I'm out of the office I have to carry a cellular phone so I can be called.
I have a terminal connection at home so if something happens at night or in
the morning I can try to dial in and fix what ever is wrong.
I get called on system, db, or application problems though I didn't write
the applications. Some I can solve over the phone, others require attention
either from the terminal or on-site (you know the drill)
Frankly I'm tired of it because I NEVER get away from the office. What few
vacations I've taken I have to carry the phone with me. They've shipped
a terminal and modem to my parents house when I took my family down for
christmas last year. I appreciate their trust and confidence in me to
solve problems but I need some space!!
As far as compensation is concerned, there has been little (if any) for
above and beyond. They say thanks, and that's nice but it doesn't help
pay the rent.
As far as who calls, it's either the president, one of the v.p.'s or a
division manager. Usually they call if a group of people (or themself) is
unable to function. Depending on the severity of the problem, it's either a
wait until I get into the office or I head in immediately.
I would establish some sort of reasonable amount of time to be worked for a
week (say 50 hours). If you're on call, your plans ought to be flexible for
possible interruptions. If you've already done your 50 hours, and must
respond to a call, extra compensation is in order.
A possible solution for those annoying calls (no paper in the printer, delete
a lin in 'vi') might be to build a trouble-shooting guide for the more
responsible users to go through before they call one of you in. Granted that
places responsibility on them but it might save a few calls.
Anyway, as I said I'd be interested in what you get (including salary). I'm
in the low **'s but this is Utah and a small firm who's trying to build
profitability.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: s...@ingres.com
I'll be quite interested in your survey results. We are in the midst of
trying to put together a policy on that ourselves.
Current situation is that we carry beepers during the day, but not
after hours. We can receive telephone calls off hours and deal with
them as best we can (and that is left pretty ambiguous.)
There are a couple of proposals here for a more formal after hours
support plan. One is something like this:
1. Volunteer to join the program;
2. the on-call person gets a cellular phone and notebook pc (with
cellular modem if possible);
3. Calls can only be made if they are considered "critical" and
that is strictly defined as a must meet 1 of 3 criteria:
1. more than 4 people affected, or
2. on the "critical" systems list (policy for getting
systems on this list is not clearly defined yet), or
3. executive staff initiated;
4. For carrying the beeper you get $50/day.
5. If you actually must come onsite during off hours you get some
comp-time as well.
The compensation plan has some variations, but the cost is basically
the same.
Issues that have come up here are the small number of systems people
available for the plan, which basically may mean a person is on call
every 2-3 days. There is the potential of burnout problems, not to
mention the screwing up of schedules and other support if one is
taking comp-time due to an off-hours site visit.
The cost issue is a very great one since it can be perceived as
getting 2-3 times more work out of the group by paying a very small
amount for it.
Good luck with the survey!
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: m...@Pa.dec.com
There are various issues involved here of which I'll only mention a
few of the more important ones:
I'm going to answer the questions for this job and my previous one,
which had radically different attitudes:
DEC, Senior Unix systems administrator, VAXen and DS5000s. Salary
available if you ask.
How much compensation is there for being on call?
1/8 time
How often are you on call? (ie: do you share?)
every other week
If you share, is everyone cross-trained?
supposedly
If you do not share, how do you deal with not being available to
provide support? (ie: you've been out drinking, you're having
dinner with your fiance' and are currently on your knees
proposing, etc, etc...)
Not applicable
Is there compensation for cancelled dinners, movies?
$100 if you come in to deal with a problem.
What level of emergency must exist such that paging someone is an
appropriate action. (ie: flood, fire, disk crash, terrorism,
no disk space, no paper in laser printer, forgot password,
how to delete line in ``vi'', etc......)
Depends; generally someone can't get their work done. Actually
coming in only if there is a problem that is stopping a majority of
our users, or someone who is mission-critical.
What is an adequate response time?
Generally, contacting the user in 1 hour, with further work to follow.
8-6 we had a trouble hot-line for users.
Who is allowed to page? (ie: security staff only, Applications support
staff, users....etc....)
All users.
UCB, Senior Unix systems administrator, VAXen, Suns, PDP-11s and a
Cray. Salary was ~$**K/year.
How much compensation is there for being on call?
none.
How often are you on call? (ie: do you share?)
1 evening a week
If you share, is everyone cross-trained?
supposedly
If you do not share, how do you deal with not being available to
provide support? (ie: you've been out drinking, you're having
dinner with your fiance' and are currently on your knees
proposing, etc, etc...)
Not applicable.
Is there compensation for cancelled dinners, movies?
Not officially. In practice, taking extra time off out of the day was
normal.
What level of emergency must exist such that paging someone is an
appropriate action. (ie: flood, fire, disk crash, terrorism,
no disk space, no paper in laser printer, forgot password,
how to delete line in ``vi'', etc......)
Major service down.
What is an adequate response time?
15 minutes 8-5, 1 hour outside of those hours.
Who is allowed to page? (ie: security staff only, Applications support
staff, users....etc....)
Operations staff, and others who are on call (i.e, my boss).
We'd appreciate any comments you may have on this. If possible, please
provide your company name, position, and a brief list the sort of equip-
ment you deal with. (Salary would be great too for another battle we're
fighting but is not important.)
Basically, adding on-call time post facto is a lose, and I wouldn't
put up with it unless you get something in return. If you're paid
hourly, this isn't as much of a problem; just don't forget the state
laws regarding overtime pay.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: ja...@laguna.CCSF.caltech.edu (Jack Stewart)
Message-Id: <9112030331.AA01813@laguna>
To: novatel!hpe...@uunet.UU.NET (Herb Peyerl)
Subject: Re: Administrator on-call policy survey.
Status: RO
Herb,
We don't really have a problem with people being on call largely because we have
Operators that man the shifts from 4pm to 8am. The Operators eliminate about
90% of the need for somebody to be on call since they are to handle all of the
basic stuff including system reboots, board swaps, user questions, etc.
Naturally they are paid for it and rather handsomely (about 33K/year which is
very good for operators). I don't know if its a solution that you can use or
not.
Another friend of mine who works at a VMS sites has the policy that he only
works about 30-35 hour work weeks. Thus when he does get a call it isn't
overtime ...
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: r...@ingres.com (Bob Arnold)
We are in the process of evaluating this question too. Basically we
currently provide best effort and don't carry beepers at home. Anybody
with an emergency can call our hotline, which is staffed 24hours/day
Mon-Fri and during the day on weekends. When it isn't staffed, or when
the folks on the hotline can't handle it, the call can be bumped up to
our manager at his home. If he's there, he'll deal with the problem or
try to find someone who can.
In my group, there are four UNIX sysads, 3 VMS sysads, and one IBM mainframe
sysadmin.
There are several proposals on the table now to upgrade this service.
It's going to cost money. I have a guess at what will be approved,
if the powers that be think it's worth the cost.
>How much compensation is there for being on call?
$500/week, or $70/night [ <-----Oy Vey! Yowza. ******]
>How often are you on call? (ie: do you share?)
Yes, we'll share; i.e. UNIX sysads will share amongst themselves,
VMS sysads will share amongst ourselves; dunno about the IBM sysadmin.
>If you share, is everyone cross-trained?
Within UNIX, yes. Within VMS, yes.
>If you do not share, how do you deal with not being available to
> provide support? (ie: you've been out drinking, you're having
> dinner with your fiance' and are currently on your knees
> proposing, etc, etc...)
NA.
>Is there compensation for cancelled dinners, movies?
Probably not.
>What level of emergency must exist such that paging someone is an
> appropriate action. (ie: flood, fire, disk crash, terrorism,
> no disk space, no paper in laser printer, forgot password,
> how to delete line in ``vi'', etc......)
We have a very friendly user community, so we'll leave it up to them.
We don't have much abuse of privilages. But suffice to say that it
will have to be important. It will likely be restricted to a list
of twenty or so critical machines (Finance&Admin, external TechSupport,
and key Development platforms). Somebody's workstation being down
probably won't cut it.
>What is an adequate response time?
1 Hour to respond to a beeper call.
>Who is allowed to page? (ie: security staff only, Applications support
> staff, users....etc....)
Our hotline staff and our manager, period.
We deal with 60 or so UNIX variants supplied by roughly 30 vendors,
spread out among 300+ machines. Every major vendor and a lot of smaller
vendors are represented. But this after-hours 7x24 support will probably
be restricted to key platforms as I said.
The VMS folks deal with a pretty wide range of DEC hardware and about
four releases of the OS, plus various third party software.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: mfr...@xtort.eng.pyramid.com (Mark Frost)
In article <1991Nov28....@novatel.uucp> you write:
>How much compensation is there for being on call?
We are paid "standby time" for carrying a pager. That time is 1.75 hours for
weekend days and 1.25 for weekdays. This translates to an extra 1.25/1.75
hours at our current payrate (I'm not sure if it is counted as "overtime" as
we are salaried, but we do get paid for it and it ends up being rather
significant at the end of the pay period :-) ).
>How often are you on call? (ie: do you share?)
Yes, we do share. Our group consists of software and hardware people who
support R&D engineers. 3 guys in the group are primarily hardware oriented, but
they do know how to do some sysadmin work. The other 2 of us are software types
who know almost nothing about hardware. So far the 2 of us software types have
tossed the pager back and forth about every 2 weeks ( or until we can't stand
it anymore :-) ). Recently, the hardware guys have expressed interest in
doing more software stuff. (Our group supports all machines (~80) in a hardware
capacity, but only about 12 "production" machines in a software capacity; so you
can see that there's lots more hardware work to do around here...)
>If you share, is everyone cross-trained?
More or less. We each have our own areas of expertise (I know named better than
anyone else, but I know nothing about sendmail). If need be, we can page each
other directly for help on a problem.
>If you do not share, how do you deal with not being available to
> provide support? (ie: you've been out drinking, you're having
> dinner with your fiance' and are currently on your knees
> proposing, etc, etc...)
>Is there compensation for cancelled dinners, movies?
The policy in general is that if you are declaring pager time, you should be
prepared to come in. "After hours" problems are in a different class than
"business hours" problems. That is, if someone can't read news during the
business day, we'll look at it. If someone pages me at night about it, I'll
tell them (among other "choice" words) to wait until the next business day. For
items such as downed machines, crashed hard disks etc., we will come in after
hours. Our after-hours response time can be varied. I live 1 hour away from
the office so I may call someone back pretty quick, but it may take me a while
to come in. It would definitely be acceptable to finish with your fiance'
before you come in :-) ).
There are times when we ask someone else to cover for us if we are going to be
busy or out of town or something. It's all pretty informal as we are all
pretty responsible people.
>What level of emergency must exist such that paging someone is an
> appropriate action. (ie: flood, fire, disk crash, terrorism,
> no disk space, no paper in laser printer, forgot password,
> how to delete line in ``vi'', etc......)
>What is an adequate response time?
Oh, I guess I kinda answered this somewhat already. During business hours, I
like to be able to get back to someone within 5-10 minutes (at least respond to
the page, even if I can't fix it right away). One weekends within an hour is
usually my policy. I think this depends a lot on the nature of the problem.
Is it really important that a production machine crashed on a weekend or not?
Sometimes it is more important if we have some sort of code freeze coming up.
If someone requires a special abnormal level of support for some time, it is
their obligation to let us now. We are ready to support production machines
only during off-hours.
It is also appropriate for FYI information. If the networking people are going
to be taking our networks down for some work on short notice, I expect to be
notified because if I start getting pages from my users indicating that the net
is down, I would like to know why (if there is a reason).
>Who is allowed to page? (ie: security staff only, Applications support
> staff, users....etc....)
>
>We'd appreciate any comments you may have on this. If possible, please
>provide your company name, position, and a brief list the sort of equip-
>ment you deal with. (Salary would be great too for another battle we're
>fighting but is not important.)
>
>Please send mail to <hpe...@novatel.cuc.ab.ca>. I'll also watch
>for responses under the same subject in comp.unix.admin. I will
>summarize to the net in the next couple of weeks.
Here's how our stuff works. We have an Octel voicemail system in use here.
It is possible to set up a voicemail mailbox such that when a message is
placed in the mailbox, it will attempt to page a given number. (It is possible
to tell it to page only with "urgent" voicemail or only during certain hours -
we have it set to page the "on-call" person whenever any message is put in the
box.) So someone calls the "well-known" emergency number and leaves a message.
Whichever one of us is "on-call" will get paged and dial-in to the mailbox to
find out what's up.
In general we all wear our pagers 24 hours a day. Only one of us is on-call for
the emergency number at any given time, though. Other people know our pager
numbers, they just usually don't bother to call us.
People really have not abused the system much. Once people get an idea of what
we'll do for them, and what we expect to be paged about and what we expect not
to be paged about, they have worked within those rules.
Our MIS department has a really disgusting system wherein they to have a dial-in
emergency mailbox. However, they have it set up to run a voicemail application
(one of those, "press 1 if your problem is with A, press 2 if your problem is
with B," and so on). It's bad, because it tends to overwhelm the user quite
quickly and gives little time for the person who calls in to describe their
problem. With our system, the person calls up, and can talk for 2-3 minutes if
they need to. If we need more info we can call them back.
Hope that's helpful and that I haven't rambled on too much...
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--
I: gnu == not(unix) | hpe...@novatel.cuc.ab.ca | I brew |
II: not(unix) == gnu | #include <std_disclaimer.h> | there- |
III: not(gnu) == ung | #define JANITOR System_Administrator | for I |
ERGO: unix == ung | Apollo JANITOR, NovAtel Communications | AM. |
--
*** This is the operative statement, all previous statements are inoperative.
* email: cma...@ic.ac.uk (Thomas Sippel - Dau) (uk.ac.ic on Janet)
* voice: +44 (1)71 594 6904 (day), or +44 (1)71 594 6958 (fax)
* snail: Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine
J.C. Webber III
>In article <CsGyo...@world.std.com>,
> Gregg M Doherty <gre...@world.std.com> wrote:
>>>Please excuse the non-technical nature of this question, but I believe that
>>>readers of this group may be able to help me.
>>>
>>>I am a UNIX network administrator and am currently in negotiations with my
>>>company over off-hour on-call support (24/7). Their offer was quite laughable
>>>but I am interested in how other companies have dealt with this situation (per
>>>diem, % of salary, other).
>>>
>>>PLease respond directly. If this type of posting belongs elsewhere, please
>>>let me know.
>pr...@brain.neuro.virginia.edu (Phil Scarr) writes:
>>The University of Virginia will pay $2/hour for on-call time, and
>>straight time for when you actually come in to do work. It sucks, but
>>there it is.
>>
>> -Phil
>I guess we were supposed to respond directly, but oh what the heck.
>The offer here was for one hour of pay for every eight hours of
>on-call. No extra pay if you come in, just "comp time". Supposedly
>that plan was based on existing practice by peer companies here in the
>Boston area. I don't think the policy ever got approved. Basically we
>have no on-call status.
>Personally, I'm happier saying, "Sorry I'm busy," to off-hours callers.
>On-call stinks. Don't you already work enough hours?
You must be working for a non-profit company, or else a for-profit one
that you have no stake in.
Although I would prefer to be compensated for on-call coverage, I accept
a policy of comptime. If a system is down, an engineer may not complete
his task on time. The product (new cpu chip design) may, consequently,
be late to market. If it is late, it may not garner as much market share
as it would have otherwise. The company's stock losses a point or two because
of that. Now the company has an off quarter and can't afford any salary
increases. Not only have I lost money on the stocks I hold, but I don't
get a raise this quarter. Sorry, but NO THANKS! I'll crawl out of bed,
drive in (if I can't fix it remotely via my ISDN connection), and fix
that sucker. Now the engineer gets to complete his job on time, the chip
is completed on schedule, hits the market as projected, the company looks
like they know what their doing, the chip snarfs up a huge market share,
the stock climbs, and, guess what, I get my on-call pay indirectly!
Hey, pal, it's called loyalty. Good old self-serving loyalty.
--
J.C. Webber III j...@isdn-oblio.corp.sgi.com (home)
Systems Administrator j...@mti.sgi.com (work)
Silicon Graphics, Inc. Tel (408)241-7029 Fax (408)241-7029 (*5)
"Comparing Dos to UNIX is like comparing a mix-master to a chef's kitchen"
Jamie Thingelstad
J.C. Webber III <j...@skyking.com> wrote:
>You must be working for a non-profit company, or else a for-profit one
>that you have no stake in.
>
>Although I would prefer to be compensated for on-call coverage, I accept
>a policy of comptime. If a system is down, an engineer may not complete
>his task on time. The product (new cpu chip design) may, consequently,
>be late to market. If it is late, it may not garner as much market share
>as it would have otherwise. The company's stock losses a point or two because
>of that. Now the company has an off quarter and can't afford any salary
>increases. Not only have I lost money on the stocks I hold, but I don't
>get a raise this quarter. Sorry, but NO THANKS! I'll crawl out of bed,
>drive in (if I can't fix it remotely via my ISDN connection), and fix
>that sucker. Now the engineer gets to complete his job on time, the chip
>is completed on schedule, hits the market as projected, the company looks
>like they know what their doing, the chip snarfs up a huge market share,
>the stock climbs, and, guess what, I get my on-call pay indirectly!
>
>Hey, pal, it's called loyalty. Good old self-serving loyalty.
>
Hear hear!
I carry a pager at all times and am on call 24/7. I get no 'extra' pay
for this, its just considered part of the job. I think the reasons
J.C. Webber gave are great, and lets also just have a bit of pride in
our networks and machines. Myself, if a machine or server goes down I
view that as showing on me, and want it up ASAP. Its that kind of
pride in workmanship that had me dialed in accross the country for 30+
hours on a remote line with my laptop fixing things while on my
vacation last year. It goes with the turf...
But, if you don't care how your machines are running, thats another
story...
--
= <A HREF="http://disserv.stu.umn.edu/~thingles/"> Jamie Thingelstad </A>
612.626.7846 (Desk) 612.625.5572 (Fax) Technical Coordinator
101 Pleasant St SE, 12 Johnston, Mpls, MN 55455 Disability Services
= thin...@disserv.stu.umn.edu == AOL: Thingles == University of Minnesota
John Martinez
last "desk" sysadmin job (before I became a consultant), we would get paid
a percentage of you salary just for being on call for the week. If you did
have to come in after hours (hours=7am-7pm), you got paid time and a half.
not too bad considering we were salary employees.
Again, though, we put in some loooonnnggg weeks. Usually in the range of
50-60 hours per week. usually with no extra compensation, because of the
Salary employment.
almost all sysadmins are free from working directly with their company's
product, but you are responsible for making the tools available for the
people who are (i.e. engineers, etc.). If your company don't make money,
don't pay, then don't have job. Now, the company I work for sole business
is just SysAdmin type stuff, so I have a more comprehensive view of our
business :)
-john
--
John Martinez * mart...@bats.com * UNIX Consultant, BATS, Inc. San Jose, CA
WWW Better through Mosaic ftp://ftp.rahul.net/pub/martinez/home.html
require 'standard_disclaimer.pl';
Gregory M. Paris
>In article <1994Jul20.1...@skyking.com>,
>J.C. Webber III <j...@skyking.com> wrote:
>>Although I would prefer to be compensated for on-call coverage, I accept
>>a policy of comptime. If a system is down, an engineer may not complete
>>like they know what their doing, the chip snarfs up a huge market share,
>>the stock climbs, and, guess what, I get my on-call pay indirectly!
>>
>>Hey, pal, it's called loyalty. Good old self-serving loyalty.
thin...@disserv.stu.umn.edu (Jamie Thingelstad) writes:
>Hear hear!
>
>I carry a pager at all times and am on call 24/7. I get no 'extra' pay
>for this, its just considered part of the job. I think the reasons
>J.C. Webber gave are great, and lets also just have a bit of pride in
>...
>
>But, if you don't care how your machines are running, thats another
>story...
Well guys, whatever floats your boat is fine with me. Personally I
think you're crazy being on call uncompensated 24x7. As you say though,
your efforts might have an effect on your company's stock price. Or
maybe you just can't stand the thought of one of your machines being
down. Super. Bravo. Good for you. Somebody out there probably wants
to hire a dozen people just like you.
I instead will suffer the ups-and-downs of the stock price and the
horrible idea that a machine is down, all in trade for the ability to
make plans and to spend time with my family and friends minus any
obligation to respond to pagers and phone calls. Just call it good
old self-serving loyalty.
Charles Chip Buchholtz
: Well guys, whatever floats your boat is fine with me. Personally I
: think you're crazy being on call uncompensated 24x7. As you say though,
: your efforts might have an effect on your company's stock price. Or
: maybe you just can't stand the thought of one of your machines being
: down. Super. Bravo. Good for you. Somebody out there probably wants
: to hire a dozen people just like you.
: I instead will suffer the ups-and-downs of the stock price and the
: horrible idea that a machine is down, all in trade for the ability to
: make plans and to spend time with my family and friends minus any
: obligation to respond to pagers and phone calls. Just call it good
: old self-serving loyalty.
This is getting a little off topic, but at a previous job my boss and
I worked out an interesting system that satisfied us both. I was
willing to put in extra hours when there was an emergency, but "your
lack of planning does not constitute my emergency". I didn't want to
feel like I was being taken advantage of. My boss also didn't want to
push me too far, but realized that there were times that called for
exceptional efforts.
So, we worked out a system of credits. Each credit was good for one
emergency, and he started off with 6, and got one more every 6 months.
Any time he asked me to stay late, come in on a weekend, or otherwise
disrupted my plans, he used up a credit. If he ran out of credits,
and a *real* emergency turned up, he'd be out of luck.
This way we both knew what the limits were, and didn't have to worry
about unwritten rules. For me the big issue of compensation for extra
hours is not the compensation itself, but that there should be some
explicit cost to the manager, so that it doesn't get abused.
Charles H. Buchholtz ch...@seas.upenn.edu
Systems Programmer (215) 898-2491
School of Engineering and Applied Science 200 S. 33rd St, rm 154
University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA 19104
Michael Vilain
be compensated for their time beyond the "normal working
hours". I've found for sysadmin's there is no such thing unless
you're a contractor. It cost to much per hour to pay
contractors for the extra time yet they feel the can add such
"responcibilities" to an employee's plate.
My personal time is more to me than the systems I administered.
This was especially true when I was caregiving to my
terminally-ill partner (gee, I wonder why I was laid off...).
Contracting lets me have a life.
I'm all for "doing it right" and getting compensated for it, but
I have my bounderies. Some in this group don't seem to have any.
Let's hope they last as sysadmins. I draw the line of dialing
in while I'm on vacation. If I'm bored on vacation, I should go
back to the office or take shorter vacations.
Anyway, if stuff breaks while I'm gone, then management needs to
identify backups of me to deal with problems if I'm not around.
Any business that can't plan to lose a key technical person
is looking for trouble.
And I'd take any extra $$ paid for after-hours coverage...
/MeV/
--
"His code never ran fast enough"
"He thought my pocket protector was sexy"
"Fantasy is the art of not being so picky"
"Click me, drag me, drop me...Treat me like an object"
..............from the confessions of a High-tech Queen
Phil Hoff
If we got an actual call we would get a minimum of 4 hours.
Thomas Naughton
Jamie Thingelstad <thin...@disserv.stu.umn.edu> wrote:
> In article <1994Jul20.1...@skyking.com>,
> J.C. Webber III <j...@skyking.com> wrote:
> >
> >Hey, pal, it's called loyalty. Good old self-serving loyalty.
>
> story...
>
somewhere too). I regret to say that if I didn't get paid for being
a sysadmin, I'd be doing it anyway. Working with UNIX systems is a
great hobby that I just happen to get paid for.
This is how we work out on-call (pager) access. First,
everyone who is on call 24 hours a day gets a machine at home (sparc
if necessary, but I run XFree86 on ISC so I declined). This is so
that you can dial in if there's a problem. Working at off hours isn't
a bad thing, but going down to the office sucks. If they don't want
to provide you with a machine at home, then you shouldn't be bothered
with them calling you.
You at least get slip, but we've installed ISDN to the office
for most cases (128KB is nice). This way, there isn't much that you
can't do from home.
Another result, you've got a nice work at home setup for when
you do come into the office late, you can stay at home the next day and
work from there (as long as there's a senior sysadmin physically at
the office in case of problems). Comp time is also available, but
it never really evens out for the hours over 40 that we spend at
work.
I get paid salary, but I also get a bonus every six months.
It doesn't hurt for my bosses to know that I work my ass off and
am eager to assist at off time hours. I know this isn't typical, but
I thought I should include it to let you know where I'm coming from.
In short, being a systems and network administrator isn't a 9
to 5 job. Especially if you're in charge of networks around the world!
Plan completely, test fully, and install carefully and your systems shouldn't
go down often. Monitor your networks often and look at your log files.
Create scripts to produce daily reports of possible problems and you'll
be able to solve problems before others see them. Let everyone know what
your normal hours are so they can plan to reach you then (our London office
knows to call me between 1:00pm and 4:00pm their time).
If you really don't want to be on call 24 hour a day, get your
MBA and go into management. Just remember, there are a lot of mid-level
managers looking for work these days.
--
Tom Naughton naug...@htc.com Hull Trading Company (312)697-2715
Chicago | New York | Philadelphia | London | Frankfurt | Paris | Hong Kong
"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."
-John Gilmore
C U E Here Sysop
In article <paris.7...@zygon.dev.cdx.mot.com> Gregory M. Paris
(pa...@zygon.dev.cdx.mot.com) wrote:
> I instead will suffer the ups-and-downs of the stock price and the
> horrible idea that a machine is down, all in trade for the ability to
> make plans and to spend time with my family and friends minus any
> obligation to respond to pagers and phone calls. Just call it good
> old self-serving loyalty.
My pay and working conditions are based on a union agreement with my
employer. I am, technically, a wage earner, but the wage is based on a
yearly 'salary'. The agreement states that $15 (?) will be paid per day of
being on call. Each callout is paid at a minimum of 2 hours, and all
overtime is double time; all holiday time is doubled, on top of that. We are
able to take our overtime in pay, or in time off.
The reality is a bit different. I consider myself a professional and, as
such, expect to be compensated for my time. I have made it clear that I am
willing to put in whatever extra time is necessary but, because I have
family, friends, and other obligations, I will take my due compensation.
Although there is little need in our group for being on call, we all are,
really; they get around paying us for it by pointing out that we do not have
pagers, even though they always want to know where we are. They have
instituted a new policy (against the agreement with the union) of granting
equivalent time off for overtime worked. Interestingly, I never get
overtime, anymore :-/ I would like the extra money but, when it comes down
to it, I'm just too busy with the rest of my life to be giving time away
free to my employer.
My ex- project leader had an interesting quote: "<My Employer> owes you
nothing, and you owe <My Employer> nothing." He would use it on me whenever
I got shafted by my employer. I disagree with it; it's a really poor
attitude. On the other hand, my employer is not my life, only a part of it,
and my loyalty has to be earned. So far, much of my loyalty has been lost.
This is an interesting thread!
- --
Roger Walker (403) 465-4962 **** SysOp, CUE Here BBS (403) 465-7715
GIS Analyst (403) 496-4145
FAX (403) 496-4014 Roger_...@CUEHere.Edmonton.AB.CA
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