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This attitude is very common with software engineers and I find it baffling. Is it some kind of inferiority complex? I doubt Warren Buffett worries that he is

• option_greek 5y ago
  I would say its a superiority complex : thinking software engineers are paid well and hence need to be ready to sacrifice more to maintain this superior position. And of course also because the risks of bad or interrupted sleep is not recognised widely and mostly ignored.
  • drewcoo 5y ago
    Which is why you can also see the exec team paged in the middle of the night, right? Because they're paid well and need to sacrifice?
    • joshuamorton 5y ago
      Yes, and had their vacations cut short and other such things than rank and file employees would tolerate far less.
    • SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
      I’ve definitely seen my exec team get paged in the middle of the night, and they didn’t give any indication that it was unreasonable or uncommon. If anything they seemed to enjoy it, which to be honest I do as well. Being woken up to solve a problem (on rare occasion) can be validation that you’re an important person working on important things.
      • gladinovax 5y ago
        Clearly you don't think very highly of yourself. Sad.
        • dang 5y ago
          Can you please not create accounts to post flamewar comments to HN? It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
      • redisman 5y ago
        Gross
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • strken 5y ago
      Every oncall rotation I've been in for the past five years has had C-suite executives in it. Earlier the CTO, currently the CEO.
      • Invictus0 5y ago
        The executive team elects to do it, and they also get a fuckload of stock incentive to do it. Not the case for lower-rung engineers.
• skybrian 5y ago
  While I agree that in general they shouldn’t feel bad about asking to be being Paid More (tm) you are making unwarranted assumptions about how happy they are with their current employment situation. You don’t know them, don’t know how much they’re paid, and don’t know how well or badly they deal with being on call. There is nothing immoral about deciding you’re happy.
  • coldtea 5y ago
    >There is nothing immoral about deciding you’re happy. It is when it sends a signal (about the job, market, etc) that also affects others.
    • dcow 5y ago
      Under what moral framework?
      • nzmsv 5y ago
        Not moral, practical. The majority of places that do on-call do it because it's the default. That's the problem with on-call: it somehow took on moral undertones. And as a result it does not feel safe to speak out against it. If on-call was widely seen as a negative (that a few people like because it gives them a sense of importance, more power to them) then there would be far fewer companies pushing for it as the default. As it stands, most people suffer silently for lack of an alternative. And the first step towards change is to make it OK to publicly say that on-call's a negative, a health hazard, and other options exist (though they may cost more).
    • shukantpal 5y ago
      No it is not. Because your signal is the truth for you.
      • coldtea 5y ago
        Truth is not morality. "Truth for you" much less so. All kinds of scumbags have their "personal truth" that justifies their actions too...
• rocgf 5y ago
  I also find it baffling that people still think about things the way you do. It's not necessarily some kind of inferiority complex or anything else, it's about the free market.
  • coldtea 5y ago
    "Free" market just means people bound by monetary considerations...
    • rsj_hn 5y ago
      It means no one has to trade with you if they don't like what you have to offer in return. If you consider that "bound", then OK, but that language doesn't illuminate, it hides. It is a painful slap in the face when the market doesn't price what you have to offer as high a you like. I know a friend who was convinced that her calling was to be an artist, but always had a hard time selling her works, and often complained about the unfairness of life. I guess she was "bound" by monetary considerations by not being able to make ends meet as an artist. Eventually she gave up and became a hospital lab tech and is well compensated. So the market was telling her that her skills as a hospital lab tech were much more valuable to society than her skills as an artist, even if her own preferences were otherwise. At the same time, some other artist can buy an entire oceanside condo for one painting, because the market does value their output very highly. That's all that we're talking about here. It is "free" but that doesn't mean that you'll be able to get whatever you want in exchange for your own output.
      • nzmsv 5y ago
        The free market works the other way too though. If lab techs were in high demand (as they are), and your friend's employer was demanding an unreasonable schedule, she'd be free to jump ship to a better job. Right now software engineers have that kind of market power, so why not use it? If tomorrow the market decides we are overpaid, we'll either accept it or change jobs like your friend did. What I don't get is not using the power the free market gives you because?...
• staticassertion 5y ago
  Lots of other fields have on calls or out of work expectations. That's part of the job, and you're compensated highly. It's not like on call is a shock or something, it's not "whatever they throw at me", it's just... part of the job. My sister is a dentist, she has to be on call sometimes, it's not a shocker or something you don't know when you're signing up for the job. You're implying that people aren't negotiating, but that's baseless. Software engineers are highly compensated because of these expectations, and we all negotiate accordingly.
  • wildrhythms 5y ago
    >we all negotiate accordingly This is quite a sweeping statement to make. My first engineering job salary was non-negotiable. I was told to either accept it, or they 'rapidly' move to another candidate.
    • staticassertion 5y ago
      I meant more collectively. But of course, yes, it's sweeping. It'll change regionally, or based on experience, or company culture, etc. But I don't think it's unfair to say, especially in the US, that software engineers are highly compensated.
  • rodgerd 5y ago
    > Lots of other fields have on calls or out of work expectations. Yes, and in many of them there are call-out fees and overtime. Programmers and sysadmins have convinced themselves that, as "professionals" they are not aligned with traditional working-class constructs like this.
    • staticassertion 5y ago
      > Yes, and in many of them there are call-out fees and overtime. Why is that any better than just getting paid overall more? Lots of companies also have internal policies like "if you get called in on a weekend take a long weekend next week" etc in my experience.
• jonas21 5y ago
  The CEOs of every Fortune 500 company (and many smaller ones too) are on-call 24/7.
  • YZF 5y ago
    1. They get paid 10's of millions of $'s a year. 2. I doubt this is true. I've worked (and do work) for fortune 500 companies and have never ever heard of a CEO being paged for some sort of emergency. Presumably there can be some sort of crisis where they'll have to be involved within some reasonable time (extremely rare) but that's not exactly the same thing. That's why they have people working for them. That's not to say that some CEOs (especially for smaller companies) don't work very hard.
    • PeterisP 5y ago
      They definitely get involved when there's a meaningful impact on the company operations. Every business continuity plan involves top management; I've personally seen it in mid-size companies, and for the really big megacorps, just recently I was looking at a case study on the Maersk (#297 in fortune 500) management response to a cyberattack and it pretty much starts with the chairman being woken up at 4am local time. (e.g. source at https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/maersk-reinstalled-45-000-pcs-and-4-000-servers-to-recover-from-notpetya-attack/ https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/maersk-reinst... ) "presumably there can be some sort of crisis [...] but that's not exactly the same thing." - I'd say that it's exactly the same thing; on-call engineers are (or should be) just on an escalation path for crisis/emergency events; top managers are higher up in the escalation chain (if it's not a routine thing that others can easily resolve) but they're on escalation chain for every aspect of a large company. Of course, those events need to be rare - for example, as the original article states, up to 2-3 actual calls per year for a person being on-call; we should probably make a serious distinction between "on-call for emergencies" (which should be rare) and "routine out-of-hours support" (which might get triggered every week or even more frequently, obviously not an extraordinary event but a standard business process), which is something quite different and should have different solutions than emergency escalation.