I can see how it’d seem that way. Few years ago a friend who worked marketing referred me to a senior “platform engineer” position in his org. I asked about on-call in the interview, the interviewer filibustered and never really answered the question. I tactfully pressed and made it clear this was an important topic to me in evaluating employers.
They finally relented and explained Seniors had a two week rotation. When it came time to talk about salary I gave them a number about 20% higher than my norm (mind you: the job ad didn’t list a salary, nor a salary range, I was interviewing totally blind about what even the floor was)-effectively, in my mind an extra 10% for every week I was to be ‘on-call’.
Trail went cold, emailed asking for a follow up, recruiter never responded, ghosted. Found out from my friend the following week, when she called and asked “what did you SAY in that interview? They told me you weren’t a good culture fit”
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I can see how it’d seem that way. Few years ago a friend who worked marketing referred me to a senior “platform engineer” position in his org. I asked about on-call in the interview, the interviewer filibustered and never really answered the question. I tactfully pressed and made it clear this was an important topic to me in evaluating employers.
They finally relented and explained Seniors had a two week rotation. When it came time to talk about salary I gave them a number about 20% higher than my norm (mind you: the job ad didn’t list a salary, nor a salary range, I was interviewing totally blind about what even the floor was)-effectively, in my mind an extra 10% for every week I was to be ‘on-call’.
Trail went cold, emailed asking for a follow up, recruiter never responded, ghosted. Found out from my friend the following week, when she called and asked “what did you SAY in that interview? They told me you weren’t a good culture fit”
“I asked what the on-call schedule was like”
The way I see it, a bullet was dodged.
Anecdote to put in your tea, if it helps.
There's another HN thread about what questions to ask to evaluate an employer. I think on-call related questions are the most valuable/telling.
Do you happen to have a link to that thread? I'd be curious to see if there are others I should be adding to my battery of questions
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25928641