Work related B#B#B#B#B#B#B#B#B#B#B#B# $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

[Justo Exposito]

Hi Paula,

Thanks for your reply in Spanish.

I work for a services company and our client in this moment is Axa Insurances, this client is starting in production a Call-Center with a Cluster and 24x7x365 environment. At the moment they not need people that must work out of the normal timetable.

The only thing that I want to tell you is that your work is very hard, in the past I was in a job with similar conditions and I change to other company.

For me is more important my life that my work, and I want to work enough, earn money enough and live.

Best Regards,

Justo.

[Volker Borowski]

Hi Paula,

as a consultant I have been on call for diffrent companies in diffrent environments.

From that experience, I found, that you can have several very stable systems, where you get one call a week, and that you have environments, where anything gets wrong all the time, depending on
- the number of machines involved
- the state of the application
- the stupidness of users
- the age of the hardware

Now if you operate one system that most likely has trouble at 02:00am, I think being "on call" is a harder job, than beining on call for 20 servers that usually do a good job.

From real life I know diffrent payment approaches:
1) 20 EUR for a weekdays night, 30 EUR for a weekends night (on call) + another 20 EUR for the first real call + regular payment for working time in this period.
2) 30% of hourly rate for each hour being on call (this was a large production environment in the car-industry).
3) 50 EUR netto-compensation for each weekday being on call 75 EUR for a weekends day (24 hours). [This was the best I ever managed to bill, because it was in a very stable environment :-)]

Volker

[Stefan Farrelly]

We get a flat 250 pounds ($US 350) per week for keeping our mobiles on when on-call, and if we need to respond we charge per hour (eg. if we need to come in and fix something). This is about average in my experience here in England.

[Eugen Cocalea]

Hi,

work week = 40 hours (8/day * 5 days)

company requirements:

- available by mobile 24/7/365 - mobile should be payed by the company but since I make personal calls, I pay what exceeds a certain limit
- always carry enough money to take a taxi from any corner of the country I happen to be (well, it would be faster if they would give me a car) - this way, it's about 5 hours from the farest country side (small country, deh) but usualy I am supposed to be in the city - it means at most 30 minutes away from the company.


what I get for this:

regular salary - bigger than the medium in the country, not satisfying for the amount of work required.
no extra money for the time I spend in the company in extra hours (not playing, working, there is always something else to do when the normal workday is over).
no extra money for on-call interventions - it doesn't happen more than once per weekend, but (damn!) it happens in EVERY weekend - stupid users always find a way to mess up something.

so, if you ask yourself why am I still working here, here's the answer: believe it or not, the company is the only one in the city that uses HP-UX :) it's a major quality at the moment, for me :)

E.
no bonuses

[Eugen Cocalea]

Oops,

the 'no bonuses' sintagm below my signature was meant to say 'no bonuses ever'. Well, that's it.

E.

[Victor BERRIDGE]

Hi again Paula,
Some precisions:
Official working time 40hrs/week...
When I said peanuts, the amount I announced was for the period NOT per hour...
Then to get the peanuts, you have to be officially on call that means your boss has put down your name in a on call sheme, Ive been put down for last year only one week (that was an extra 100 SF...)and never for the police, so the rest of time is considered as overtime;
now is considered overtime only what your askes you to do as "special duty overtime" which finishes on the special counter, the rest (most of my time) goes to the flexitime counter which allows you to take a max of 1/2 day a month, only (which happens to me every month) this counter is trunkated at 40hrs, so every 1rst of each month I start with 40 hrs credit...
The other counter allows you to take more (1-5 days at a time)but only if your dept. can afford missing you during that laps of time, since you are doing overtime you can imagine the negotiation...


All the best

Victor

[Andreas D. Skjervold]

Callout rate....

I get a paid for celluphone to be on call (but then again our "on call" is not an absolute requirement. if we are available we're available...)
, and then of course normal overtime payment if I'm called out(2 hrs minimum) + approx ??150 for the callout.


Andreas

[Eugen Cocalea]

Hi,

Just noticed that Stefan gets more than my salary for a month just to keep his mobile open and Andreas makes a little less than my salary in just two hours :)

Nice.

E.

[Systems Department]

Just to through the cat amongst the pigeons. We have a customer in Ireland who wanted cover from 5pm on 31st Dec to 5pm on 1st Jan for their roll over to Euro. The engineer who got the on-call support got ??500 for the cover plus normal hourly rate if he got called (which he did and then spent from 1am to 7am on New Years day working on a problem).

Deepest sympathies, Graeme.

[BFA6]

Hi Paula,

I'm on call one week in three.
We get paid ??10 a day for being on call, and ??10 per call.

Regards,

Hilary