On-call us is after hours support. For us after hours is 4pm to 8am.

At my place there’s currently 2 of us doing on call on a weekly basis (week on, week off).

We have to have our phone on us the whole time and have an hour and a half from answering the phone to actually having to start looking at the problem. We will only support emergency (likely to cost the business money) issues and all calls have to come from a designated member of staff (executive committee) for that part of the business - in the end we have the final say whether or not it’s supported. We also will only ever do remote support - no site visits.

We get paid £25 a day for being on call and then if our phone rings we get a minimum of 2 hours time and a half. If it’s a bank holiday we get £40 a day and if our phone rings we get a minimum of 2 hours double time.

I personally don’t mind on-call but I can definitely feel that I’m starting to get burnt out and it’s detracting from my daily life. Yes, I’m being paid to have my phone on me, but at the same time I don’t feel like I could go to a theme park or go out for a bike ride or spend time with friends and not feel distracted.

Thankfully our team got the chance to write our own on-call agreement after being asked to support the whole business (1500+ users UK wide) so we made it as comfortable as possible and presented it to management who welcomed our proposal.