On Call Roster: An Alternative Remuneration Model

Most production DBAs I know are involved in a rotating on call roster, and in return for taking home the pager/phone/laptop are remunerated to some degree. The typical remuneration involves a base amount, plus an hourly rate for on call incidents. Depending on the amount paid, it's not unreasonable to suggest that the incentive to avoid getting called out is not strong enough.

In light of the previous post on meeting availability targets, I'd like to suggest an alternative to this model. Short of removing all remuneration for the on call person, and therefore the possible incentive to engineer outage incidents, I've often considered the idea of having a fixed sum of money set aside each year which is reduced by a certain amount each time an unplanned outage occurs. In a perfect year, the entire sum would be available at the end of the year, to which it could be distributed as a cash bonus, additional Christmas party event or various other incentives.

Depending on the amount set aside and the number of team members, this is an obvious incentive to reduce unplanned outages (and stay employed until bonus time!) I've not worked under this environment before, and depending on the reliability of the team members, I'm not sure that I'd want to! Having said that, I think it's got the potential for some interesting team dynamics, and at the very least, should focus attention on what's really important; reducing unplanned outages.

I'd be interested in your thoughts.

Cheers

Source: http://www.rodcolledge.com

Comments

[Kevin Devine]

Where I work, we are also on a rotating on-call schedule. We work on "straight time", which means that if I was up fixing a server issue for two hours, I can be two hours late the next day. Additionally, we get a day off the week after our rotation is over. This works pretty well as it does not promote "sabotage" to get more money.

We also have a bonus tied to database uptime. It isn't a lot of money and only paid quarterly, but it does give incentive to keep the servers online.

[Rod Colledge]

Kevin - I think that's a good balance. I like it.

Cheers

[Stuart]

We do a Daily allowance doubling on Weekends and Public holidays. If a server goes down you don't get paid anything extra but if the server stays up it's money for doing nothing except having to watch a pager.

Additionally, in 'harsh' situations (ie. calls after ~10pm or extended callouts) we do Time Off In Lieu meaning late arrivals or potentially full days off.