Re: Slightly off topic (apologies) - DBA on call rate?

Different companies handle this differently. From what I've seen, there are basically three schools of thought (or derivatives of the three).

1. Companies feel that you are a salaried employee and do not deserve any compensation for being on call. It's part of your job.
2. Companies understand that when you get called at night, that it is disrupting your personal time. So they "pay" you back with compensation time, or comp time. If you get called and work 2 hours on a problem, then you have 2 hours that you can take off of work at any time.
3. Companies pay extra for being on-call. Normally, you'll get paid a small fee to carry a pager 24x7 and then get paid for the time you work. This normally isn't too much (maybe your salary calculated to an hourly rate).

Where I work, we use option #3. We get paid for 4 hours of extra pay at our normal hourly rate just for carrying a pager. If we get called, then we get paid for that too. But we can also trade our extra hours for unofficial comp time to be taken instead of vacation time.

HTH,
Brian

Fuzzy wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> My employer is starting to mumble the dreaded words "on call". This
> hasn't been an issue until recently (I'd like to say due to my
> masterly skills). What I have no clue about is what to ask for in
> terms of outside normal hours on-call rates, and rates when a call
> actually happens.
>
> Any rough ideas out there of what kind of rate to expect/demand? (I
> don't need to know exact $$ unless you're comfortable with that,
> percentages of normal rate will do fine). The work will mostly be
> trouble-shooting critical Oracle performance problems, connectivity
> glitches, "Oh-my-god-I've-screwed-the-database" situations, emergency
> restores, etc.
>
> Thanks in advance
> Fuzzy
> #;-)
 

-- 
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Brian Peasland
Raytheons Systems at
  USGS EROS Data Center
These opinions are my own and do not
necessarily reflect the opinions of my 
company!
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