on-call rates

[David Cantrell]

On Thu, Jun 28, 2012 at 09:38:17AM +0100, Dirk Koopman wrote:
> I have been asked to make myself available "on-call" 24/7 (for defined 
> periods of time) on third line support on a product that rarely goes 
> wrong. Nearly all problems are infrastructure or user cockup. However, 
> said users are a) paranoid about blame and b) by default, it must be our 
> product's fault until proved (*PROVED* I say!) it isn't (99.9% success 
> rate on that so far :-). Oh, and by the way, *please* get us working PDQ 
> (pretty please).
> 
> I believe I might get called 1->4 times year. Are there any standards or 
> bits of common practice out there that can help me price this up?

There have been a few threads about this on uknot, you might want to
look there.

If t'were me they wanted to have on-call, then the price would be
dependant on the impact on my social life.  For example, if I must
always be contactable by phone immediately, they'd have to compensate
me for no longer being able to go to the cinema or theatre, or able to
go on holiday to nice places with bad signal.  If I must be able to get
online and fix things immediately, that would cost even more as I'd have
to remain sober and have to have a laptop and a 3G dongle of some kind
with me all the time.  And so on.

But I can't go on call.  "I'm deaf, I won't hear the phone ring".  It's
quite convenient really.

-- 
David Cantrell | Bourgeois reactionary pig

comparative and superlative explained:

<Huhn> worse, worser, worsest, worsted, wasted