I’m a Frontend software engineer. I make the interfaces for apps you use and also the designs. I took a job where, to my surprise, I was added to an “on call” schedule. Basically what this means is, when something is wrong on the site, I’m immediately called to fix it
First of all, this is very strange since I’m a Frontend engineer. All the problems I would be fixing are not in my area of expertise sometimes in codebase I know literally nothing about.
So 1 week of the month during the day and 1 week a month during the night, I literally can’t be away from my computer/phone for more than 15 minutes. This is especially egregious with night time on call, where I have been explicitly told by my manager “don’t go to the gym, don’t go out to dinner, don’t do any of that, don’t even drive anywhere if you can avoid it. If you get paged, you need to respond and start fixing it in under 5 minutes”. You can be sleeping and a loud alarm will go off and you gotta fix a problem and still come into the office the next day and do a full day of work
During daytime on call, I have been told that I should order food only via delivery and shouldn’t go out to get food. In practice, when I tried to go out and pick up food, I got paged and had to turn around. I need to be basically glued to my computer
To me, if your time off from work isn’t actually “time off”, you’re still working. When I get out of work, I go to the gym and maybe cook a nice dinner, if I cant do that, then I don’t truly have free time. In reality, it means I’m on the clock 24 hours a day for an entire week every month.
I know software engineers can be paid a lot but this just seems ridiculous