This framing is also sort of a misrepresentation. It's an annual government-funding bill, and it includes some money for COVID relief. All of the broader criticisms about horse trading still apply of course but those apply just as much to separate bills with informal agreements on votes. The only difference is it's really inconvenient to hold hundreds of votes in order to make sure the forestry service janitors get paid, etc. etc.
> This framing is also sort of a misrepresentation
The title of this post is: Tillis Releases Text of Bipartisan Legislation to Fight Illegal Streaming
Are you sure? Why are we passing completely new laws in our yearly budget bill? What does streaming laws have to do with paying forestry service janitors?
Maybe we wouldn't have a government shutdown emergency every year if our representatives didn't try to shoehorn their pet laws and their <strike>customers'</strike>lobbyists' favorite regulations in at the same time.
> To reduce the pain further, consider upping on call bonuses for the entire week
Are you guys getting bonuses for being on call? I kind of signed up for it (SRE) but I'm curious if this is more common in jobs that aren't primarily concerned with reliability.
Most places, if you have a half-decent manager, they just give you the time back. If you had to wake up at 3am, you get an unspoken amount of time you can claim without official PTO, on top of not having to come in at 9am. So assuming you're on call for one week, you should still only have worked 40 hours, but you can stack up that extra time to supplement a vacation or something.
Most places with on call shifts (that I've worked for at least - VC funded tech companies) treat it as a responsibility like any other for a salaried worker. I'm sure individuals have quietly negotiated special deals as they tend to do, but it's definitely not a common practice to pay extra for it specifically.
Of my last three employers, one had a dept/team policy of a weekly on-call bonus. The on-call person got a few hundred bucks extra (taxed, but still...), and there was a budget line item for it. It was a pretty nice token of appreciation. The other two - one had an on-call rotation no extra bonus but an informal comp time policy if you had a bad night. The other had nothing. The expectation was that the two guys on the team were on-call all the time. "Oh, we'll probably never call you."
Ironically, of the three, the one with the on-call bonus budget was the one where you almost never got called.
There are different tiers of oncall. Needing to be online and actively debugging within 5 minutes of getting paged is far more constraining than being the third line of internal escalation that gets a phone call maybe twice a year.
I've been asked a couple of times whether or not I'd be interested in joining the on-call rotation, but I've always turned it down. I think incentive is like a couple hundred euro a month on top of your base salary. I don't actually work in ops even though I've been taking more op responsibility as time goes on, so being on-call isn't part of my job (even though the on-call people have called me at least once in the past to help sort out issues).
My last 2 clients had both on-call compensation and call-out compensation.
The former is usually a fixed amount for a shift, i.e. 5PM-9AM during the week, weekend could either be all of it or 12h shifts alternating between 2 engineers, bank holidays might also have a separate rate.
The latter is paid on top in the case of a call-out. That can either be per incident or per hour.
In case anyone is thinking this gives engineers the wrong incentive, my experience has been the opposite. Nobody minds being on-call, and not only no one is intentionally sabotaging the systems in order to get called out.
The call-out compensation is widely seen as an extra to compensate for a night of bad/interrupted sleep as opposed to being something you look forward to cashing in, and it serves as an incentive to convince managers that systems are better off being resilient on their own rather than relying on manual intervention.
In the comments (which I don't recommend reading, they're full of extreme racism), an apparently regular user says they tried getting donations before but it's never enough to last more than a few months.
Normally at tech companies there’s a review and bonus twice a year. At ours we only participate in one of them, the other is done by management, and for most of my career ours would just pretend he decided to give us a bonus for our hard work one day. You had to ask around and notice it was always the same week to figure out how it worked.
That a lung cancer occurs at some rate such that a particular study could only detect it when smoking five cigars a day doesn't actually tell you anything about your individual risk without knowing the population size of the study. Well, it tells you that there's probably some causative connection between smoking and cancer, but it definitely doesn't give you a "safe" threshold beneath which you can smoke without risk.
Also, shouldn't you be more concerned about oral cancers and cardiovascular disease? I understand most people don't inhale cigar smoke into their lungs like they do cigarette smoke, so you would certainly expect the lung cancer risk increases to be relatively lower.
Rather than pay for early exercise costs and cover the tax burden, I think it makes more sense for early companies to extend the period employees can exercise options to 5-10+ years after they leave. Several places actually do this already, I've been offered it without asking in fact!
Small companies probably can't afford to pay taxes for everyone's 83b elections, nor can they afford the 401k match or the other missing perks. After all, if they could afford to compete on cash comp with big tech cos, surely the founders would rather do that and preserve their own equity stake.
But with exits taking longer and longer, such an exercise scheme lets rank and file employees preserve some small upside that they have earned themselves, and not worry about hurting their career by being forced to wait for an exit.
I think I generally agree that employees get a pretty bad deal. I think it used to look better, but these days you can make so much more money so much faster working at Google than you can at a random startup.
That is why when the 83b bonuses start making you choke, that its time to start converting into RSUs, and delivery of those RSUs happen at first liquidity, which means after the 6 month lock up period of an IPO, not at IPO.
