Wouldn't that incentivise staff to take longer to fix issues? Once you've been interrupted, you might as well turn 30 minutes into 60 minutes, etc.
Have a minimum of say, 60 minutes, and if that is exceeded, the issue gets escalated or deferred. If deferred, presumably to the next day shift, the cost is limited. If escalated, the second person must also defend the time spent. If management still doesn't trust their workers to be honest, then the company has other issues that tweaking on-call will not solve.
Many systems that pay hourly for task-based work like this deal with this problem by instituting a minimum number of hours of pay per-instance, which is usually higher than the expected time it takes to complete a typical quick task.
That way, by taking longer on any but the hardest issues, you are instead removing your ability to make more money on other, faster issues.
If you call out a master electrician to flip a circuit breaker, they are going to charge you a lot more money than for the half second it took to flip the switch.
Also, if the reason they have to come flip that switch is that they screwed up the job they did earlier that week, you don't get charged at all.
This thread is full of people acting like highly experienced trade workers are idiots who have never thought of how hourly work might be gamed for more money. All of this has been long since solved by the industries that actually operate this way.
> Many systems that pay hourly for task-based work like this deal with this problem by instituting a minimum number of hours of pay per-instance, which is usually higher than the expected time it takes to complete a typical quick task.
That's how it works for the occasional on-the-side server/printer tech jobs I occasionally take (long story short: I took a temp IT job years ago, resigned to go somewhere else, but the company never took me off their payroll so I get the occasional call to go install some number of printers or some number of servers/switches/etc. for some customer of HP or Dell, respectively). The usual rates are pretty abysmal for someone of my experience and skill level, but the 4-hour minimum means that if I can bang out one of these jobs in an hour or less I'm making more per-hour than at my day job. Nice bit of occasional money to blow on craps or penny stocks or shitcoins or whatever, and it keeps my fingers on various industry pulses.
This will just lead to classic Cobra Effect where people just push shit on Friday afternoon and then take their sweet time to fix it
The article mentions exactly that excuse:
> If on-call engineers were to receive compensation for each incident they resolved, it would incentivize them to intentionally build systems that fail so they could increase their pay by increasing their on-call load.” My guy, that is sabotage and fraud. You are hypothesizing a scenario where your subordinates are committing actual crimes. If somebody is doing criminal acts at work, fire their ass! Not to mention that anybody who deliberately self-inflicts on-call load is a goddamn idiot and should be sacked just on that basis alone.
Deliberately breaking the system is different from taking your sweet time fixing an issue.
It's a matter of degree. Sabotage doesn't always mean instant breakage. In "The Simple Sabotage Field Manual" we learn to slow down the organization by things like "Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible", "Work slowly. Think out ways to increase the number of movements necessary on your job.", and "Do your work poorly and blame it on bad tools, machinery, or equipment."
If you are the person who consistently takes 10x longer than everyone else to fix issues, then someone has a conversation with you. It's not that hard.