> Meanwhile the average on-call engineer at a large company has none of these freedoms. The underlying systems are chosen for them and they just have to deal with it.
In most cases they have all of those freedoms, and the only barrier is one that's shared with the self-employed person: not liking the consequences of choosing those options.
They could negotiate with their manager to lessen the load. They could upgrade the systems. They could straight-up refuse on call.
They don't because they don't like the consequences of taking these options—and neither does the self-employed person!
> not liking the consequences of choosing those options
Correct. "Shove it" is usually preceded by not liking something.
> They could negotiate with their manager to lessen the load.
Most of the time the manager will simply refuse. As a business owner it's my decision.
> They could upgrade the systems.
At big companies this is usually outside the scope of an on-call engineer. The on-call engineer often doesn't even have commit rights to that repository.
The specific example I gave was paying $10/month more. That can be a very hard sell at a large company because their service contracts are much more complicated/expensive.
> They could straight-up refuse on call.
A business owner has much more negotiating power than an employee does.
> They don't because they don't like the consequences of taking these options—and neither does the self-employed person!
In the vast majority of cases making changes to the on-call infrastructure has very little (if any) measurable impact on the business. Like spending a week making the systems better. Or changing deploy/release dates to be more convenient.
As a business owner I can take advantage of this and make my life easier.
As an employee I have layers of bureaucracy to wade through and will probably be refused. Not because it affects the business but for other reasons.
That's the difference.
Do others not generally get extra pay for the time on call?
I have the enviable situation where I am on call for half of every month, I get paid significantly extra for this, and there's maybe 1 emergency call per year.
My last several jobs the extra pay has been a small phone stipend, and perhaps a very small token sum (maybe $50 for the week).
The only time I made significant money on call was early in my career as a contractor.
Nope. Amazon, for instance, has their engineers on call in a variety of roles with no additional pay.
Salaried tech employees do not get extra pay for being on call, generally.