Here's my take, after working for an agency that tried to introduce "on-call hours".
I've mentioned this a few times on here, but I know a lawyer, and he's friendly enough to take a look over any contracts I sign at work and to let me know what to look out for, what is enforceable, etc. He does it for me for free, but I know he does it for others too (his specialty is contracts) for a lot cheaper than I assumed a solid lawyer would cost.
Anyway, my employer brought us in to a Monday morning meeting one day and told us that due to signing a new contact with a client, we'd all be doing on-call support, with a rota for who would be on call that day. I had Friday's, and was told that every Friday I would need to be available from 6pm-6pm. On top of this, we were told we'd be paid something stupid like £10. Not an hour, just £10 for being on-call, and an extra £5 should an alarm go off.
I mentioned to the Head of Tech privately that this wasn't in our contacts, and that I don't want to work on-call. Later on that day, we were all told that we'd have new contacts available to be signed later on that week, so I sent a text to my friend and asked his thoughts.
The long and short of it was that I could refuse to sign a new contract if I wasn't happy with it, and that if a deal couldn't be reached with work, I could be free to leave with no repercussions. I said this to my boss, and in the end I was told that I didn't have to do on-call work. I had mentioned this to a few others at work, and about half of the dev team chose not to work on-call. Those that did didn't even try to push for more money, and they took the extra days that others didn't work. One guy worked Friday to Monday on-call for two years, for around £30 a week, and some Amazon vouchers as payment.
Nowadays, I actively turn down jobs with on-call hours, and I won't take a job with on-call hours unless it was for my own company or my own product. I don't give a fuck if spending more time outside of work with the product I built will make it a better product, or if it'll force me to write better code. With that being said, in my experience there are plenty of developers out there who will happily work any extra hours requested, even if the money is poor, because it puts them in the good books of their managers.
At my last place, we needed to support a product outside of office hours, and we found that there are numerous consultancies/companies outside of our time zone that specialise in this exact thing. We ended up working with a developer in San Francisco that handled overnight support for us. Even with minimal experience of the product, we never had downtime they couldn't fix.
I've mentioned this a few times on here, but I know a lawyer, and he's friendly enough to take a look over any contracts I sign at work and to let me know what to look out for, what is enforceable, etc. He does it for me for free, but I know he does it for others too (his specialty is contracts) for a lot cheaper than I assumed a solid lawyer would cost.
Anyway, my employer brought us in to a Monday morning meeting one day and told us that due to signing a new contact with a client, we'd all be doing on-call support, with a rota for who would be on call that day. I had Friday's, and was told that every Friday I would need to be available from 6pm-6pm. On top of this, we were told we'd be paid something stupid like £10. Not an hour, just £10 for being on-call, and an extra £5 should an alarm go off.
I mentioned to the Head of Tech privately that this wasn't in our contacts, and that I don't want to work on-call. Later on that day, we were all told that we'd have new contacts available to be signed later on that week, so I sent a text to my friend and asked his thoughts.
The long and short of it was that I could refuse to sign a new contract if I wasn't happy with it, and that if a deal couldn't be reached with work, I could be free to leave with no repercussions. I said this to my boss, and in the end I was told that I didn't have to do on-call work. I had mentioned this to a few others at work, and about half of the dev team chose not to work on-call. Those that did didn't even try to push for more money, and they took the extra days that others didn't work. One guy worked Friday to Monday on-call for two years, for around £30 a week, and some Amazon vouchers as payment.
Nowadays, I actively turn down jobs with on-call hours, and I won't take a job with on-call hours unless it was for my own company or my own product. I don't give a fuck if spending more time outside of work with the product I built will make it a better product, or if it'll force me to write better code. With that being said, in my experience there are plenty of developers out there who will happily work any extra hours requested, even if the money is poor, because it puts them in the good books of their managers.
At my last place, we needed to support a product outside of office hours, and we found that there are numerous consultancies/companies outside of our time zone that specialise in this exact thing. We ended up working with a developer in San Francisco that handled overnight support for us. Even with minimal experience of the product, we never had downtime they couldn't fix.