Living in Singapore, working in startup, where there is no oncall pay, and with a small domain team of 4 excluding lead, 4 of us are on weekly rotation, meaning we are oncall 1 week every month. Funny thing is even during maintenance activities like DB upgrade which normally happnes at 3am they will ask oncall from all domains to standby and perform some kind of sanity testing after maintenance activities completed. Pretty dumb if you ask me as I thought SREs are supposed to be on this. Is this how oncall is like in general or whats the expectation you would have for oncall before you join a company? Also wondering where can I go as a backend engineer so I don't need to do oncall? #singapore #swe #softwareengineering #oncall #backend
We don't get paid but we almost always do maintenance during office hours. I haven't been paged in sleeping hours for many years
the db sanity checks should be automated and should page on failure. part of on call work is measuring incident metrics and fixing reoccurring incidents. a healthy company shouldn’t have huge number of reoccurring incidents.
Don't think oncall allowances are common. In my previous company actual incidents that required paging the oncall occurred less than 5 times in a year. Sounds like OP's company does not have proper devops practices in place.
In my previous company. This was the policy: Engineers are paid extra (subsidy) to be on-call and there’s a roster for the team. If an on-call is required (planned or unplanned), the engineer is paid on top rate 200% per hour. Since my team (network) had many calls and planned maintenance, I would easily earn an additional 25-30% of my salary due to overtime - however, in many cases this money was not worth it as it was quite demanding and requires weekends and traveling to the office during night time for maintenance.
What's the practice in Singapore for on-calls? Do other companies pay? Is it an hourly or fixed rate?