Good for that guy, sounds like he got out of a bad place. I'd absolutely quit if someone tried to force me to be on-call without an enormous pay raise (e.g. at least local minimum wage for every hour I have to be responsive to calls, regardless of whether a call actually comes in).
Maybe I'm naive, but doesn't it depend a lot on the situation? If I'm being told to be on-call for a system I don't know and can't debug, then I would set the expectation that I'm going to reduce my availability for other work while I learn this new-to-me system to the point where I feel confident that I can debug prod issues (to the degree that any of us can debug prod issues, anyway), understand the major risks to that system and common operations, etc. If they say, "sorry, you have to be on-call for this new thing and also keep working 100% on something else", then I fully agree - bad situation, incompetent management, time to go. But needing someone to be on-call for a system isn't a bad sign - in a different viewpoint, it's a good sign that someone is anticipating a future problem and actively planning ahead.
The issue is the change in workload. If I'm going from "40 hour work week" to "40 hour work week plus on-call" then you need to compensate me for the increased workload. If you're not going to increase my compensation, then I'm not going to agree to increase my workload.
I agree that that would be fair, but we should also acknowledge that usually an IC doesn't actually have any leverage in this situation, although this depends on your location and particular employment situation. Typically (and maybe this is changing) a US software developer is employed overtime-exempt at-will, right? So, you can ask for this, but as per your employment agreement, they can absolutely demand this of you and let you go if you don't agree. I'm not arguing that is the way that it _should_ be, just that to my knowledge that's the way it usually is.
Edit - you say you're willing to quit if they don't agree, so I guess you're up for this possibility. More power to you!
Yup. There's a hojillion jobs out there, and I'm a good engineer. I can find another one if my current one decides to piss me off. I value work/home separation very, very highly. No work stuff goes on my personal devices, and I leave my laptop at the office. You want me on-call, you're gonna be paying me for it :)
But regardless, outside of rare exceptional circumstances (sometimes there's a deadline and shit's gotta get done), I'd recommend anyone to tell their employer to pound sand if they ask for more work from you than you agreed to.
Basically, yes, although I imagine that specific scenario rarely happens in practice. That's why I'm saying the guy in the OP got out of a bad situation: his workload increased without any benefit to him, and he got out of that abusive relationship.
In the US, the vast majority of these positions are salaried. You get $X/year to perform the duties you're expected to. Because we don't have unions and 99.9% of people are not expert negotiators, "the duties you're expected to" are never actually defined. That means your employer is incentivized to stack as many duties on as they can, until they approach your breaking point. So long as they don't break you, it's free work for them. Employers regularly abuse inexperienced people and desperate people, who don't have the confidence or financial wiggle room to say "no." I applaud those who normalize saying "no," and encourage forming unions so there's a group of experts in the room whose job it is to fight back against this kind of abuse.
We also have salaried positions where the time unit is a day (this is the typical cases for white collar jobs). You have to work for 217 or 218 days every year and the normal day is 8 hours.
If you are on call then you get paid x% more during that tile and it cannot be more than y hours per month (I do not remember the values). You also have to have at least 11 hours of rest between the days.
The duties are not clearly defined either (despite continuous ideas on how to measure them, which consistently fail year after year) which is a good thing: it is not easy to have this as a reason to fire you (you have to have a good reason to fire in France).
We value work/personal life proportions a lot, but we also are very serious when it comes to work. It is only from the outside that it looks like we are constantly on vacation or having lunch (this is true for some parts of the workforce, to the point of becoming a stereotype).
> If you are on call then you get paid x% more during that tile and it cannot be more than y hours per month
This is required by law? Yeah we definitely don't have something like that in the US (except for life-endangering roles like doctors, truckers, airplane pilots, etc). It's up to each individual to negotiate their acceptable amount of on-call time and compensation.
(Just to be clear, "being on-call" doesn't mean you are actively working, just that you agree to be responsive if someone reaches out to you about a problem. That could take 15 minutes or 4 hours to resolve, but if no one calls then you are not actually working during the on-call time.)
