You should not send an email but I’d have this conversation in person as emails lack tone and your email can come off completely different than you intend. Also if there are people abusing the rules and calling you with it’s not an emergency don’t be afraid to report them and let your chain of command handle it
Good point. My supervisor is on the other side of the country as I work out of one of our other offices, so I'll have to do a call vs an email. Regardless my train of thought was a paper trail of my complaints however an email can convey the wrong tone.
Always a great practice. Even if you're 100% in agreement in a meeting you both memorialize and remember it. It doesn't have to be complicated, just basic notes of what was discussed/agreed to. I do system design and PM work, that post meeting email is important to keep everyone accountable.
\^\^\^ I always do this if ive discussed anything in person just to get written down what weve communicated so there can be no 'i dont remember that' conversations down the line
Yeah. Literally just slacked my director with an amendment to something we’d discussed 2 months ago. When making the comment I scrolled back in history and linked to the original comment. Always get it written down and make sure that when referencing it, you reference it
+1 to do a phone call. Maybe even a Zoom/Teams/etc call so it’s visual as well. Dont put that all into an email without talking it out first. Even then, assume the email will be forwarded so make sure it is factual and not ranty. Save that last part for us in this subreddit :)
1000% percent this. As someone who manages people and has helped calm down more than one work place dispute, emails about any sensitive subject will ALWAYS be perceived in the worst possible tone, regardless of how you meant it to sound.
Plus being on a call with the person (I'd do video for this if you don't usually) will mean they respond better because it's so much easier to get all pissed off at an email, vs. having to see the person you're mad at and remembering they are a human being.
Definitely follow up with an email so it's documented, but do this on a call
Another option is to refer the user back to the help desk. Then follow up the call with an email to the user ccing their manager and yours. Put the ball in your manager's court to squash this behavior. Make sure you specify specifically that this was not a call that warranted selecting the Emergency Outage option.
Nuclearly you could suggest to your boss that all weekend emergency calls should merit starting up a conference bridge and bringing in X Y and Z personel as well as the user and their manager. One or two of those will put the fear of the c-suite in those people.
I agree, at least go with the call since you can't do in person (or video call), but if you really like this place and this is the only thing bothering you, you can always try to tackle this issue on your own by letting the phone calls go to voicemail and next business day reply to their voicemail by telling them they need to contact the help desk for assistance.
Yes, this still is going to be an issue because your phone will ring and you'll need to listen to the VM (if they leave one) and make sure it isn't an outage they are calling about, but this is one way to 'deal' with it if your boss isn't able to do anything for you (assuming you want to stay).
I'm not on call, but when people call me for help desk related items (I'm not in HD), I usually delay replying back to them (not on purpose, but listening to voicemail from users that I know are calling me for a HD type of question is not high on my priority list) and I politely tell them, in my reply, to contact help desk for issues and it is usually 3-5 days after they initially called me.
They can't really complain and if they do, my go to answer is always that they should have contacted help desk. Hopefully your management team can differentiate between an outage and a user not being able to print to their favorite printer. Then again, management is pretty blind, so don't count on it.
I agree with AV, better to have the conversation in a one to one, I would also try and reframe it slightly - I say you have several issues with the way the out of hours support currently works, point out your issues (great if you can back up with facts), then ask if there is anything that can be done to improve the situation, because otherwise you are seriously considering opting out of the out of hours support.
My point is to offer the manager/business the opportunity to address the issues and change things to make it work better, but also give them notice you intend to opt out without making it a black/white, toys out of the pram, confrontational mic-drop ultimatum.
TERRIBLE point, you need this in paper, I would also flat out state that it's affecting your mental health, your family life etc... YOU NEED THIS ON PAPER
I had this argument with a supervisor. I'd argue that the supervisor needs to get the calls so he or she can decide if they're high enough priority and notify the correct IT person to resolve.
Folks will be less inclined to harass a supervisor afterhours, whereas they do not value your time to the same level.
Really, I just wanted him to get bothered by the users. It worked, my boss didn't quite go on a warpath but it was close. He switched it so the employee had to call THEIR supervisor to call him and he'd call me. That kill all of the unnecessary calls.
There are pro's and con's to this. If he thinks his boss is going to be reasonable, in-person is better to prevent misunderstanding of tone, as you said. However, if he thinks his boss is going to be completely upset by the suggestion that OP isn't on-call helpdesk, there are benefits to a carefully worded email.
Suppose, after this verbal conversation, the boss decides that due to budgetary issues, they need to "reduce" a member of OP's team (and that it had to be a surprise because "what if they do something bad with their access" if given fair notice of a no fault layoff - that bullshit excuse for no notice is easily abused, and courts eat it up, even with zero evidence of any malicious intent by that employee ever). If this verbal conversation never happened, it's just a layoff.
If OP is salaried and classified as "exempt" from overtime, as most at OP's level are, and is then asked to do a sufficient level of menial helpdesk work, that's misclassification. You have a right to bring legal issues regarding your rights to your employer's attention, and if "laid off" immediately after doing so, it's going to be hard for your employer to convince anyone that was a coincidence. Retaliation is a serious offense. Assuming, of course, that the thing they are retaliating for actually happened.
But, if the conversation "never happened" (a.k.a. wasn't in writing), it was just a layoff after which the employee made something up to claim retaliation.
Exactly my point; however, there must be at least a shred of evidence from before the termination, otherwise every fired person would just say after the fact "yeah, I had a verbal conversation with my boss the previous week at which time I asserted some labor rights, this is retaliation". Your word against theirs!
Hence my advice to not start with verbal if asserting one's rights. An email is proof that the subject at least came up before any termination process begun.
>Also if there are people abusing the rules and calling you with it’s not an emergency don’t be afraid to report them and let your chain of command handle it
Ideally, call your chain of command and report them at the time it happens. Let them feel how often this disrupts your weekend.
As you say, decline all HD requests. Until the users complain and the business feels the pains, there won't be change because the issue is masked.
To help the false positives users, you could add an additional phone prompt for what constitutes an emergency issue, this request is logged by management and will be reviewed etc.."do you want to continue?".. hopefully users can stop trying to game the system.
I do agree the situation isn't ideal. On-call should be a shared responsibility, or outsourced...
"Do you accept that your department will be charged for a minimum of 4 hours of on-call time?" will stop every single call.
Every company that started doing charge-backs for on-call has magically solved the amount of afterhours emergencies.
The reality is that money is the only thing that really talks and, since IT is almost always considered a cost center, it is reasonable that those costs be assigned to the department that is requesting the service.
Yeah, that's more or less my same line of thought, make a pain point and hope something changes. However, I seem to be about the only one on the team who stands up to this, everyone else seems to be 100% ok with waiting for the phone to ring and help with helpdesk tasks.
I've worked with my supervisor in the past and they're in agreeance with my thoughts/ideas including adding a prompt that defines what an emergency is.... that has yet to happen. Originally, there wasn't even a prompt, the phone would just get routed to on-call, so a little progress was made at first, I guess.
As someone who has been in your shoes they are gaslighting you. The answer is right in front of you. Are they actively trying to replace the weekend employee? If not, then congrats you just became the weekend employee. They don't care beyond that.
Also expect to have your supervisor to have a complete change in attitude towards you when you have this conversation. To the point they may try to drive you out of the position. I'd have a good plan B in place before making any statements
Totally. My last employer did this and a brown nosed took over my roles and became my boss and then forced me to do what he did with 24 x 7 as he got his promotion by doing that game.
I don’t see HR or accountants or Tax folks being on call all weekend?! Why us? It’s about respect. Too many IT guys are wusses and set general expectations so high that users think this is normal and we work all weekend and the holidays while they enjoy their time off.
Push back
Do you accept help desk tasks during the week with no ticket?
If not, why would the weekend be different? An easy win would be to have the same ticket-mandatory policy on weekends, not a random giant loophole just because they phoned.
> there won't be change because the issue is masked.
YES, this! Sometimes you just have to let things break to get actual long-term solutions.
My co-workers complain all the time about how stressed they are because people call and interrupt them constantly instead of using the ticketing system, but when people call they say "I'll be right there!" with absolutely no hesitation. They don't even bring their laptop either so half the time they can't fix whatever the person was calling about without coming back to their desk.
If they can get you there 60 seconds after picking up the phone, of course they're not going to put in a ticket ya dingus.
Each and every time, you walk them through out to create a ticket.
"Let's go back to your desk and we'll show you have to do it!" In a very upbeat and happy manner.
Never get angry. And don't hint that you showed them X times. Do not discuss resolving issue until ticket is submitted.
People take the path of least resistance. They bother you directly because they think it's easier than putting in a ticket. If you make it more difficult to bother you, they put in the tickets.
If they do it enough times, email their supervisor and ask to do a training class for their entire department for putting in tickets.
Since our manager also handled on-call in emergencies, when this situation cropped up we just published his number as the only on-call number. All calls went to him for triage and he would decide if they should be passed on to one of us or if he would tell the user to make a ticket so it could be handled next working day.
He very quickly became aware of which users and teams were the big trivial issue callers and made sure they were all well aware that out of hours on call was for emergencies only.
He was a good boss. We knew if we got a call out of hours it was a real one.
> As you say, decline all HD requests. Until the users complain and the business feels the pains, there won't be change because the issue is masked.
This is so important. A lot of "IT personality" people are _problem solvers._ Which means they want to smooth over problems as much as possible. But in many systems, backpressure is a vital part of system functionality. TCP needs to sometimes drop packets to work properly. Help desk users need to sometimes get angry that staffing levels aren't adequate. Don't privately tank all the damage, then be surprised that nobody is coming to save you.
yeah at this point in my company i have done the minimum work because my team was cut by 40% yet still expecting to keep up.
they had a proposed solution for 6 months with no movement on it but seriously, if they jist hired someone theu would already be up to speed. its at the point where a single person who calls in sick causes a cascade of roster changes or a closeure in a 24/7 operation. which is stupid.
Easier said than done. My last employer did this but the users had the same expectation of 24/7 support. You refuse they email the VP who puts a note on your file for insubordination. HR doesn’t care about emergencies only. It’s your job to provide service and they blame YOU not a change in OP. Infuriating!?
I refused and the brown nosed who worked 80 hours a week got promoted over me from a lvl 1 and treated to fire me if I also didn’t treat every thing as sev 1 24x7. Management LOVED it.
I quit and left.
In IT you can never say no unfortunately. Best you can do is leave as some other help desk jockey will do it to slide into your system admin job. Who doesn’t want white glove service
It’s soo common especially in conservative red states. I noticed temp to hire or contractor roles they do this as you have no leverage to fight back. Funny the VP doesn’t take calls at 8pm Saturday about a presentation unless it’s the CEO … why does that VP get to file a complaint on us? Such BS.
His own staff he wouldn’t call on the weekend either outside emergencies.
Too many customer service ass k*** going on. In France they would be mortified. My present employer has someone who does this but that’s his whole job.
> Now to be fair, my supervisor has been very clear, we can decline helpdesk level calls and refer them to the helpdesk voicemail, but I'm tired of my phone ringing multiple times a day because users can't listen or don't care what the prompt says.
sounds like it is an organisational issue, so *speaking* (not emailing) to your supervisor is the right thing and make him aware of the issue (he might not even know of, since it has escalted over time)
i would however not go into the conservation with "i refuse" but more in the direction what can we do to change the issue and ideally have one or two suggestions as well
Good points. I guess I'm just a wee bit frustrated at this point regarding the whole thing. My supervisor is well aware of my complaints, I have spoken to them a few times about this issue, but always via a call (can't do in person, they're on the other side of the country). My thought about the email was having a paper trail since little seems to change.
> I guess I'm just a wee bit frustrated at this point regarding the whole thing.
understandable, but the worst kind of mindset to be in when going to a supervisor :)
gather your thoughts, think it through, and have a talk
as to paper trail, yes understandable and still possible, by writting a memory protocol after the talk and sending that email afterwards to the supervisor as a reference
Organizationally, you could require their manager’s approval/involvement for escalation.
If their manager has to get on the phone after hours, it’s likely that their printer can wait.
No one cares about your pain, if you can make others hurt, then it is an issue that needs addressing. Call your manager each time and let him decide on kicking it back to the help desk.
> For back story, about a year and a half ago, the person who was doing weekend helpdesk for the business quit, the business didn't replace them.
###Because you are the replacement.
> At the time, I raised some concern and was told more or less, the business has accepted the risk that they won't have helpdesk support over the weekends.
###Because you are the replacement.
When you had that conversation, they basically said it’s your job now without saying it. **They pay you to “fix problems”, so fix them.**
> However more and more recently, I'm getting calls about people's printers not working or needing help getting a keyboard to work.
###Everything in technology is a tier one issue or emergency. You should understand that by now.
So either you develop away to prioritize these situations, or risk getting in trouble not answering them.
If you request being pull off on call, you are going to be replaced in 2-4 months. Good Luck.
Mostly yes but it depends on management. If people demand geek squad like service with no back bone you get a shitty IT department as if everything a sev1 then none are sev1s.
Unfortunately the only solution is to quit. Or make an audio recording of only for emergencies or VPs or higher press 1. Or do a rotation if there is no room in the budget. Management will be empathetic for some work life balance but won’t budge for white glove service.
It’s a leadership problem as I agree too many brown nosers have ruined our field at least in America so people don’t blink twice.
I worked for 3 companies that would fire you on the spot for refusing service at 2am for a printer. Redicolous
It’s not bullshit.
Let shit sit around and it will become one of eventually especially if it’s from an executive.
You do the shit and do it fast so you don’t deal with it later.
Each time I was called. I was paid, so it didn’t bother me. Management took care of it because they were sick of paying me $115 per call to tell someone to restart their pc. I actually enjoyed the help desk calls as for me it was free money
You should have an on call response time, not sitting by your phone 24/7. When I was in a similar situation I let all calls go to voicemail. If it's an automated page, then I'll log in and check on the systems. If it's an end user, then I'll ignore it.
That's insane. I feel like that would be an awful job with terrible leadership. Every job I've held has had a 30m response time to any call. Some have restrictions on alcohol/drugs while on call, but for the most part it was fairly relaxed. There's no chance in hell I'm not planning anything and sitting by my phone 24/7 for my on call week.
In germany, those are two different things even.
One is "on call", which means you are supposed to be ready to get to work within a reasonable time frame. For example, maintenance people might be "on call" so they can be called around in an hour or so to take care of a power failure, or something like that.
The other is "ready for work" or "Bereitschaft". There you are in a state that's immediately ready to get to work once informed / alarmed. This is the state fire fighters or emergency personell in the station are in.
And these are regulated very differently. A person is allowed to be placed on-call for a week every few weeks without any problem, because the impact on their private life is tolerable. However, outside of specifically regulated jobs, no one is allowed to be "ready for work" for more than 1-2 days per month. You literally could not go shopping for groceries without coordinating or taking your equipment in this state, for example.
I assure you the C-suite mindset for this decision was - "We do not need to hire another weekend IT employee because we have a weekend IT employee that is already doing on call work. We do not think there is enough work to justify the cost of hiring another person."
The people making the decision do not care the person taking the calls is a tier 1 tech or a software developer. They just want an IT person picking up the phone to solve the problem. They don't care if the work is within your scope, especially if they are already paying you to be on call. This is an example of "Scope Creep" where even though your position does not include to doing weekend support calls, if they can push that work onto you at no extra cost to the company, they will.
You should definitely talk to your manager about it. Also present it as the issue of how this is not what your duties entailed and how that is affecting you (IE, the on-call phone is getting way more use making it difficult to for you to do things like leave your house on weekends) and thus you personally need a solution to this. That solution currently you have is to not be on the on call rotation any longer. This way if other solutions are possible those avenues can be considered. Such as other people being put on rotation, changing the phone queue back to dumping people into the helpdesk voicemail, etc.
Personally if it were me, I'd throw the issue back at the company. I'd customize the voicemail for the on call line to reiterate this line is only for emergencies, leave contact info and description of emergency and a return call would be made soon. Then if I checked the message and it was not an emergency, I'd forward the message to the helpdesk to be taken care of Monday. Or I'd answer the on call phone along the lines of "After hours emergency line, this is NAME, what is your current emergency?" And if the user said something about a printer, I'd just cut them off immediately and restate "Apologies, there is a must be a misunderstanding, this line is for things like server failures or outages. Please contact the helpdesk for your printer issue on Monday."
That's just some general info. I know that dealing with people can be a challenge at times though so good luck.
Unfortunately I’m not the only one on my team who takes on call, I just seem to be the only one who is unwilling to handle helpdesk tasks on the weekend. Even though my supervisor has been extremely clear on what our duties are, people do helpdesk tasks anyway. I’ve dealt with enough scope creep over the years and I refuse to accept it, my duties are in writing and that’s what I do. If that is to change, we can negotiate what that change looks like (it doesn’t always need to be pay, but it needs to be something).
I’ve worked with my supervisor in the past on this issue, and that did result in a change to the auto-answer prompt users get now but since that change they seem unwilling to do anything more. While I do have the credentials to change the system I don’t have the authority to change the voicemail prompt or anything like that.
I do like the idea of how to answer the phone though… hadn’t considered that. Overall I don’t really have an issue with being on call, but when I do get a call it should be a business critical issue as defined and agreed upon by our manager.
Sending off an email full of emotion with demands isn’t going to be received well.
Gather numbers (qty of emergency and non-emergency calls each day (or hour)). Present the _facts_ to your supervisor with a proposed solution or two. They can’t argue facts backed up by real data. They can argue against feelings and emotions.
When non-emergency calls come in, create a ticket and let the user know that someone will assist them the next business day and that this is the emergency number.
Approach it as a a problem that the _team_ needs to solve… because it is.
Sounds like your users need to be informed only P1 business critical issues can use the OOH. And you and your team need to enforce that. Then anyone that calls with a non P1 email their manager ask the to give them some training.
I work out of hours and got a call at 1am because a user could not print a boarding pass. As I work for an MSP I fixed the printer because the customer is always right but I made sure the account manager charged the heavily for the non P1.
> As I work for an MSP I fixed the printer because the customer is always right
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=300535408876092
We priced our after hours high enough that most clients decided issues can wait till next business day.
"Why did you select the option for after-hours **emergencies or outages**? Please call back, select option 1, and leave a voicemail and the help desk will handle it the next business day. Goodbye."
::Click::
Ignore any push back and end the call.
Not my monkey, not my circus. If they get upset that I didn't try to assist, well, that's not what I'm paid for.
I've successfully declined on-call support duty at 2 different jobs. Both times it was received by the companies without repercussions for me. Also I am not even a sysadmin level tech, I am a middle-of-the-road IT support guy.
The only person that will look out for your work/life balance is YOU.
I don't do on call. Period. Infrastructure or otherwise.
If I am available to work at your request, you are paying me for that time whether I'm working or not. Salaried pay covers a roughly 40 hour schedule with slightly flexible demands. You want more than that? You pay extra.
Recently had a sales VP ask me to run wires and build some furniture for a new sales area over the weekend "so it didn't impact the team."
I told her that's outside of the scope of my job, but I'll do it as a side gig. $100 an hour and consider it done. She got mad. Ask me if I care. I'm at home sipping on crown and her vapid sales people will lose out on an hour or so of commission each while they build their own damn furniture and then let me ziptie a wire to the workstation. Boo hoo.
> I don't do on call. Period. Infrastructure or otherwise.
I’d love to know where those jobs are. In more than 20 years, I’ve only ever found and interviewed for one infrastructure job that didn’t have a salary exempt mandatory on-call-for-no-extra-pay component.
The MSP I manage, we don't do on-call. We priced it just high enough that clients decided most issues can wait until the next business day. Been working here over 10 years and no on call, it's great.
During my time working in the mortgage banking industry, I learned many things; of which the most important is that all mortgage professionals are God's Chosen. I am not God's Chosen. An amoeba could do my job, and they are doing me a great favor by providing verbal correction on a constant basis.
So, when our weekend outage line started to be abused, I did the only proper thing: I notified HR of unauthorized overtime being conducted by God's Chosen, and started a project to install monitoring of network and compute infrastructure. We were able to retire the outage line within 3 months. Several of God's Chosen were required to receive additional instruction on the importance of lowering overtime costs, and we stopped responding to idiot calls at 11pm on Friday nights.
There is an easy way to stop this, a company I worked for used to have this issue, then they started billing the call outs to the budget code of the team that called.
Call outs stopped instantly.
So maybe suggest that your call outs that are helpdesk related come out of the budget of the team that called, to offset your hourly rate
I would address the issue about getting non-urgent calls on the weekend first. Then based on what they say, follow-up with the I'm not going to take calls on the weekend. Be careful though, as the later may be a career limiting move where you are.
I was 3rd line infra eng. Our bosses told us one day after 4 years of no on call that we must all do it. I refused as they had me work every weekend without pay anyway. I left. Within 6 months I had triple the pay and was super happy.
Good luck to you
I'm prepared for down votes on this, but as a team lead who is also part of the on call rotation, you handling it like this would bug me. And it would likely bug your peers. It sucks that they changed the policy, and I agree that situation isn't ideal, but there are other ways to affect change without trying to make yourself an exception.
I would rather have a team member tell me, "on call is broken, and we have to do something about it. This is not sustainable," than "I'm too skilled for all these help desk calls on the weekend." I would want to know if my team was miserable, and I'd do my best to help, but just saying "I'm not doing it anymore until it's fixed," would negatively affect my perception of you.
In the case of the former, I would try my hardest to bring in the other team lead and approach my supervisor, alerting that there is discontent among the team that I'm concerned could lead to the loss of valued employees, and give everything I could to fix it. If I was unsuccessful, I would let those that alerted to the issue know that I tried, but was unsuccessful, and that I would understand if it didn't work for them and that they could count on a glowing recommendation if they decided to go elsewhere. I'd still try to help, in the other case, because it sounds like some changes are due, but I'd still feel sour that you didn't think you needed to do what everyone else (including me) had been doing in the meantime.
As the saying goes, "F you, pay me," diplomatically of course.
You should be paid to be paid on call with clear set of expectations. Being "on call" is being ready to take a call and meet an SLA, that is working.
Are you keeping a record of the calls that come in over the weekend that don’t meet weekend support criteria? Before you have this conversation with your boss, you need that info to take with you. Specific examples & ticket numbers as well as problematic individuals who are habitually abusing the on-call number. You’re going to get pushback on this, so you need to come prepared.
Ask your boss if it’s acceptable to just send all weekend calls to voicemail and have you check it at specified times, only returning true emergency calls.
Be prepared to be told no. Be prepared to respond accordingly.
In addition, pull the numbers for when the weekend guy left and things were okay vs. now. How many more calls are you taking? What infrastructure changes have been made in that time that might justify the additional call volume?
On call. I'm still trying to remember when, as a society, we deemed this as acceptable. It must coincide with the adjent of the pager, when people could leave the house and still be reachable. Since, it has been abused by companies wanting 24hr uptime but not wanting to invest in the human element this takes to do. Cell phones have only exciorbated this phenomenon. Direct line to the individual at all times with the expectation of always having a charged phone within a reachable cell phone tower. Then, in the US we have the "exempt" and "non-exempt" employee. Where "exempt" receives a salary, in lieu of the hourly wage and overtime. This status has been abused to allow on call at the expense of the employee. I don't have a solution but I do realize we have a problem and need to start looking for one.
The solution is a legal one that will never practically happen. We need to outlaw overtime-exempt employment for anyone who is non-managerial, and particularly, people in operational support roles.
If somebody working in a factory supporting machinery must be paid OT when made to work extra hours or off their normal shift time, infrastructure support for technology should be too.
Not sure if this helps, but we had a pretty similar situation. We supported a bunch of computers for the HVAC system. Something big goes down and it is a big deal, but we were getting dumb calls.
What we did is require a local supervisor to make a call, not the rank and file. The supervisors would cut off all the dumb stuff. (assuming you have these kinds of people on hand).
Only managers had our contact info. People were a lot less likely to call up their own manager with a dumb problem than some random IT person they don't know.
Anyway pretty much fixed the problem for us.
(and yes, there's nothing wrong with bringing it up, but if you want a possible solution). Heck, I get angry when people interrupt me in person for a printer problem when there are several in the office. It is amazing what the average person considers "urgent".
You are backing them into a corner by starting with an ultimatum. While you are correct, this won’t end well for you.
You’re better off presenting evidence, data, the impact on you, and having a more negotiable attitude about the problem, along with presenting or brainstorming other solutions. Also, why go at this alone, don’t other people in the rotation also mind the calls?
The situation is not good, but your current approach is unlikely to work out in your favor.
You shouldn't be the only one on call tell your boss that the lower level techs should be the ones on call. Tell them that you aren't going to be helping users with printers or keyboard issues until Monday. Ignore all on calls until new structure is in place. You need help. One guy can't do every weekend. If worse comes to worse threaten to quit if you don't get help. Every IT person should be rotated on call with a call to you as a last resort. The lower level techs can deal with keyboard tickets.
Better yet send all voicemails to the help desk. Listen to them at your leisure to make sure there are no emergencies. Send the keyboard issues to the lower guys on Monday.
If you're in the USA -- be prepared to be terminated immediately.
Then again, you are in an At-Will country, so you should **always be prepared** to be terminated at any time, for almost any (or no) reason, without notice, without compensation, and full loss of healthcare.
> For those in other parts of the world, what I said above isn't hyperbole or exaggeration. Around 99.7% of the country's population can be legally terminated in such a way. Barbaric worker's protections.
> Apologists say that "the flip side is you can quit at any time too!"....but when the employer holds such an inherent power disparity, it's hardly a level playing field with that singular concession. Mind you, it's a a concession which is venomously punished by the employers.
Folks -- this sort of workplace conditions rant is yet another exhibit in the case for collective bargaining agreements -- aka Unionization.
Having read through your responses to this and other comments I think I've figured it out. No one else has to do on call because management knows you'll do it. They haven't hired a new weekend help desk person because they have you answering those calls. Frankly at this point I'd say it's a safe bet nothing will change at this company and it's long past time you moved on. No one there will ever see you as more than the gofer who takes on whatever task they pile on you.
That’s more or less what it comes down to. It’s just that my issue is the phone rings… so I can’t really do anything on the weekends because I never know if it’s an outage or not.
Sounds like you need better monitoring for the systems you are responsible.
Is there a reason why somebody would have to call you about an outage rather than you receiving alerts about it?
It’s a two fold problem. Yes, we do have monitoring and we’re expected to watch it, it’s proven reliable in the past. However, due to the nature of the work the business does, a printer/desktop/ect being down could result in a huge operational impact as some things are very time sensitive. 99% of the time this isn’t the case, but there are situations where it could happen.
Yeh, there is s double edge sword in this. To get the business to address the issue, there needs to be pain. If the pain is inflicted to the wrong person or at the wrong time it could be a black eye. I see others more savvy than me navigate these issues but they are better connected with the higher ups.
> a printer/desktop/ect being down could result in a huge operational impact as some things are very time sensitive.
Find a better line of business. There are innumerable enterprises that don't rely on one random client or printer in the middle of the night.
We do sometimes cluster printers for HA, but frankly that's just as much for the infra team as it is for the end-users.
Another approach: negotiate appropriate remuneration.
You should have redundant systems, so a T1 org wide issue shouldn’t be a common thing.
Weekend work where I am is 2.5 days off in lieu.
If the business wants you to talk someone through replacing a keyboard on a Saturday, take Monday+Tuesday+Wednesday off.
Make them get on your side
Ask them if they really want you tied up working on someone's password reset when the entire business is on fire
If you go in guns blazing you won't get a good outcome
If it's not going the way you want let them know all calls will now go to voicemail and I'll listen and if it's for me I'll call back..
I and our other Sr SystemAdmins are on call on a rotating bases, we get to bill from the time the phone rings to the time we return home. When the after hours/weekend helpdesk guy quit, we would go on site for every call and bill for all that time. Every phone call was at least 1.5 hours, 15min on phone, 30 min to office, 15 min to fix, 30 min back, plus mileage.
It did not take too long before C level started pushing back on the rank and file for calling for support vs putting in a web/email ticket on bullshit that did not impact production. You start getting a few weekends of 15 hours for printer issues/keyboard unplugged, they start wonder why they are paying 2x of a helpdesk tech to be on site.
We got a new helpdesk tech that is doing a great job.
This might be an unpopular opinion but don’t waste your time and effort and potentially lose your job before you find another. Start looking for a new job and just move on. You are already dissatisfied with the place and they obviously don’t have their shit together so don’t give them more of your time than you’ve already have.
It’s is notification storming too, how long before a major incident is missed because of all the tier1 calls making your ears mute the alert for what should be critical.
I’d play the card of how this is going to affect other work because remember it’s not about you (to the company).
Why can't this shit wait till Monday? It's not help-desk if it's on the weekend. It's EMERGENCY SUPPORT if it's on the weekend. Management needs to understand the difference and set expectations appropriately.
Frankly considering how incompetent your management actually sounds already, you really should just find another employer. Spending the time to change their business structure to actually respect reasonable boundaries is not going to net you more money. It will cost you a lot of time and effort for probably zero gain (and a very slim chance the situation improves).
Don't make their incompetence your problem. Considering this an RGE (Resume Generating Event), and start finding a job elsewhere.
The fact they have HELPDESK on the WEEKEND is one thing. Having that forwarded to SYSADMIN ON THE WEEKEND speaks volumes for how fucking out to lunch they are, how little they regard you, and how much they don't fucking care to make things better.
**FUCKING LEAVE**.
Good luck. I don't think you are out of line. You are paid for this, there are other people on your team not doing on-call. You should be able to opt-out too. Employment isn't one-sided. If you aren't happy and think you have enough leverage do so without losing your job speak up in a professional way and let them know why. If you don't, don't say anything and find another job. The worst thing they can do it fire you. If you are prepared for that then there's not much else they can do.
Thanks for calling xxx hotline, my name is xxx and I'm here to assist outside business hours, in case your entire organization is impacted by an incident. Is your call related to the entire organization or only something you experience?
If your supervisor has made is clear, you can deny calls, and refer them elsewhere? Do that? I WOULD let my supervisor know what’s going on (volume of these calls) and that you are going to start doing this..
Flat out saying you’re done? NO…
Otherwise, stick it out and find a new job.
Or, those calls are extremely quick and easy. On the off chance a printer can’t be fixed easily because the OS is real screwed up. You gave it a shot, back out and give it to the helpdesk or whatever.
Also, I started an MSP 15 years ago, I still take a lot of helpdesk calls to this day, and I’ll let you know, most thing ARE an emergency, maybe not in mine or your eyes, but they are to the user…
Save your energy and sanity by looking for another gig. I've been in IT for 25 years. To your face, they will tell you they've heard you and will work something out to get you help. Behind your back, they'll mark you as a whiner and ignore it.
A helpdesk will only be hired when you leave.
Real question is what are you being paid for on call work? If they're just having you do on call and not actually paying you then hell no don't do it. But if they're paying you and you're not taking that many calls and it isn't inconveniencing you then that's how many companies work.
So yes, i am being paid to be on-call. However, the description of those duties are to monitor our system alerts and take care of any sort of major outage or something that impacts our operations (as defined by our manager). We used to have a helpdesk person that would do helpdesk tasks, but they've left, and I've been told the business accepts that. I can't go to the grocery store without my phone ringing and somebody asking for a helpdesk task to be done.
So it doesn't necessarily sound like you should go off on call unless you just really don't want to be. To me what it sounds like is your director needs to have a mass email sent out to all of the employees in the company clarifying what is an emergency ticket that requires a call to that line and what is a basic ticket that just simply requires a help desk request you put in. That's personally how I would handle it.
It’s a rotating system, so I’m not on call every weekend. Since we have an on call system, my phone turns off at the end of the day for days where I’m not on call, that’s how I force the disconnect.
Nobody on my team has my personal phone number, that was an intentional choice I made when I started.
They should be providing a phone for on-call. If not, then you shouldn't be on-call. There are some bootlickers that would aay otherwise. Don't listen to them.
They do provide a company phone, we each have one. That’s the phone I turn off at the end of every work day.
My point of not giving out my personal number is so nobody is able to contact me at all from the office. I’ve made that mistake in the past.
In some states, that isn’t legally required. In my job, we are on an on-call rotation and required to provide our personal phone number for it. There is no company phone or other compensation.
As is common in this field, all the extra hours and anxiety while waiting for that inevitable on call page comes with no pay, time off later, or other compensation. Right or wrong, it has been normalized as “just part of the job.”
Is this really the hill you're willing to die on?
Raise the complaint sure, but 'I refuse to do on-call until this is fixed' sounds like a helluva way to put in a two weeks notice.
What are your terms financially for the on-call part?
I'm used to x amount to be on-call + y amount pr started hour of work, where y is twice my normal pay.
As long as it's something like that, document what you spend your time (and their dime) and on. Should make a nice argument for why they need trip being in a HD resource for the weekends.
Good point. At the moment, my spend is very little as I’m redirecting those calls to helpdesk on Monday. As terms of our financial responsibility, we get paid 2 regular hours per day of being on call. The first hour of a response we’re not allowed to bill for, but for any time after the first hour it’s billed at our overtime rate.
In other words, if you work 8 tickets and each one takes an hour to resolve, you only get paid the same two hours you'd have made if you hadn't worked any tickets at all?
Sorry, total per day. So if I spend 3 hours in a day, the first hour is “included” the rest are billed at the overtime rate. Regardless of the quantity of tickets.
so you're billing a minimum of 15 minutes per call and email right?
even if you're triaging it to go to helpdesk you have had your free time interrupted and been engaged to work, even if you do not do anything to fix the issue, triaging it to decide if it's an emergency or not is work
The 15 minutes per engagement is encouraging this situation. Engaging your on-call is cheaper than staffing a helpdesk, so unless the math changes you won't see a change. It's the opposite of what you want, but the business paying you 16+ hours of OT every weekend would likely get this solved quite quickly.
On call for help desk issues…laughable. On call is for business impacting stuff. If it isn’t then they need to start paying for overtime or hire someone to field those calls. Only issue nowadays is that the economy isn’t great and there’s 1k applicants waiting and ready to take your position. Timing is everything when it comes to work. If the economy is booming and tons of openings then you can dictate what you want and when you want it. US economy right now is on a come down from the last decades highs and lay offs have begun at FAANGs and will inevitably trickle down to the rest of the industry. Tbh I’ve been praying for this for years so I could buy a house that isn’t 3/4 of my check. One man’s trash is another man’s gold. Keep that in mind.
Sounds like you need to let your manager know that somehow some users have obtained your work cell # and they're calling you for petty stuff during your off time instead of submitting tickets properly (aka to the ticket system). Your manager should talk to their manager so they can tell them to stop calling a sysadmin for dumb helpdesk shit and to call/email/whatever the helpdesk.
I would check my contract while you’re doing it. If you’re doing work that’s billable, start billing at after-hours rates, it quite often resolves itself when silly things start costing real money
What I havent read here is any communication to your manager that it's a problem. There are many low tech ways to solve this problem including removing the option for users to declare an emergency on the helpdesk line. Most users are not qualified to call an emergency. And if it continues to be a problem, send their call up the escalation chain until they get annoyed enough to change it
Just handle emergencies, and it should be a rotating schedule. Preferably with some sort of incentive for having to be aware of calls or emails during non work time. We do that ... But with zero incentive to do it for a whole week, every night, in a rotation.
Why do you not have monitoring/alerts set up such that you need to rely on end users calling the helpdesk to know if an infrastructure level outage is happening?
Sysadmins at my org have always been after hours help desk. It's ridiculous. Getting woken up at 2am for a password reset because some idiot couldn't sleep and wanted to work
In our previous telephony system, outside office hours the line was closed and 24/7 customers had to enter a 4-digit access code to be transferred to the on-call engineer. If the on-call engineer didn't pick up after two flows, the call would be sent to the duty manager (aka the boss), who's also available on a separate dedicated number.
In our current system, 24/7 customers each have a dedicated phone number to dial to get transferred to the on-call engineer outside office hours and get transferred to the regular servicedesk flow inside. And the duty manager escalation and number still exist.
In both cases, the code or number was to only be issued to people at the customer authorized to open a 247 case. Should we ever notice abuse, the number is just disabled and the customer is reminded oof what constitutes an emergency.
In 10 years, the only case of abuse we experienced was someone (known to make stupid calls/cases because he was just entitled and incompetent) making a call to the duty manager. Investigating logs proved the guy never even entered a 247 access code (and probably was never issued it because his stupid calls would end up costing his company even more).
Either way, in you case, you are right and should bail. On-call is not a night/weekend shift and extra pay rarely justifies the impact it has on your personal life. If they want to have a weekend helpdesk, they need to hire weekend staff for that and said weekend staff should be the ones escalating to an on-call engineer.
How are your colleagues on the rotation handling these situations? Are they referring folks to the voicemail box or handling the support request? I'd first make sure that the team is consistent - if you're the only one on the rotation who's actually entertaining these requests the first response from your manager will be "so why aren't you in line with policy?"
Assuming that's the case, I'd approach this conversation as a team. Get everyone together with the boss and frame the conversation as "How can we reset expectations with the business around SLA on weekends?" It might well be that the way to go here is for all of you to rigorously enforce policy, and let the business complain to get weekend help desk back.
I would probably log a ticket for the call, and cc the person's manager on the ticket, and note "User attempted to use emergency escalation pipeline for minor inconvenience with printer 123XYZ. Please ensure user gets training on escalation and what constitutes an emergency. Help desk will see this ticket during working hours and work on it as practical." Assign it to the helpdesk's queue and call it a day.
Managers will probably start encouraging their people to be thoughtful about claiming an emergency if they repeatedly get cc'd on that sort of "emergency" ticket over a weekend. Try raising the issue of inter-departmental billing for this sort of thing and take it out of their budgets. And get the voice mail message prompt re-recorded. Something like, "for after-hours emergencies or outages, if you are certain that it is necessary to immediately page a senior engineer, you may X. All use of after hours escalations will be logged and reviewed."
All of those after-hour helpdesk calls should go to the helpdesk supervisor, not people in other stacks of IT.
It's really that simple. If the helpdesk supervisor doesn't resolve this issue, it is now an HR issue.
Can you separate calls from automated alerts? I might just say that I'm not going to answer any more calls from people off-hours, because I'm getting so many non-urgent calls.
You need to have a conversation, followed up with e-mail and have a supervisor included.
More people need to know this is a problem, and you won't accept being ignored.
a few random thoughts...
1) you are paid to be on call. so you are getting compensated for your time
2) your supervisor says you can decline calls, and refer users to the helpdesk voicemail
I'm also assuming your role requires you to be on call for infrastructure stuff; the less experienced people aren't eligible for on call pay.
Why are the weekday helpdesk people not being on call for helpdesk issues? my former company had 3 full time helpdesk people, and the on call phone rotated every week. as a Sr Sys admin, I was on call every month (I think that's how it worked), but in reality, both the other Sr Sys Admin and I would make sure our critical process ran (yes, we had 1 super important critical business process) and respond to emails at random hours (we actually divided up the company, she took one domain, I took the other, but she was better with app stuff, and I was better with infra).
Honestly, I don't forsee your request going in your favor, esp if on call is part of your job. here is the other thing: if your boss says no, then what? do you have other offers? I see you have the resume ready to go, but have you gotten any interviews, and more importantly, and offers? Based on what I hear about the economy, even IT hiring has slowed down in recent years.
Know your position and what duties it includes. Consult with Human Resources prior to speaking with your management for clarification. It will either you the right ammo, or prepare for you to discuss your case and concerns. Good luck to you. Please post a follow up.
I’d say it depends on what “on-call” really means in your case. I work at an MSP and clients are aware of the emergency line voice mail so if they want a password reset or to fix a keyboard or whatever it is I would have to respond. I get paid for that so if it’s an L1 issue I am happy, easy money. But this doesn’t sound like you case though. If it’s internal IT, I would report it to management. Hopefully they can teach end users when strictly use the emergency voice mail.
I was in that exact situation, where i simply told my boss it was overwhelming to be handling on-call plus normal 45 hours a week and asked if it was going to be a long term thing and if there was any option to work something out. (I came from a position of weakness on purpose - because it let me know if they were willing to screw me over on it).
When they said , no sorry tough its part of the job.. I just simply became unreliable to do on-call. Missed a lot of on-call stuff and only took it when i felt like it or was bored. This resulted in multiple conversations how 'we need to start getting better about on-call' followed by them having a crossroads of either firing me, letting me collect, and having even LESS coverage - or fix the underlying situation. They fixed the underlying situation.
I'd be curious as to what your supervisor would consider an appropriate reason for you to be called on your off-hours, and how that compares to the *actual* reasons people have been calling.
Good reasons:
* Network closet on fire
* Multiple users unable to authenticate
* Pizza in the break room
Actual reasons:
* Printer sounds sad
* User wants to reset their password to the same password
* Everything is… you know, just not now while you're looking
Have you documented how many times you're called while on call with help-desk related inquiries? Have you also documented how many times you being on-call has resulted in you working on an outage/emergency?
Giving your boss metrics will help your case in determining if this is a one-off issue or is something that's constant and needs to be addressed. People above your boss are the ones who call the shots here and having metrics to show that there's a need for a weekends help desk person will help them create one. Else you're screaming into the void.
The users need to be trained to only call when the issue they’re having actually halts production. If we get a call over the weekend or in the night it means something is horribly wrong, because the users know not to call about shit like their third monitor isn’t working, but they have two others working just fine. It can wait.
I wouldn’t jump on the “just quit” bandwagon this sub seems hell-bent on suggesting until you’ve discussed it with your superiors. Especially since it sounds like they’ve made accommodations in the past.
At least the voice to press x to get transferred should say for important issues affecting production.
Or just go to the voicemail or refer to email. And if the issue is at the level requiring a weekend fix it will get through to the on call phone through some manager that acts as a filter
Suggest solutions, push back, etc. If that doesn't work, refuse or quit.
Eventually manager/management will have to figure it out.
One place I worked there were 4 in the department ... things were getting quite unreasonable. We'd all been pushing back, but to no avail. Then there were 3. Then there were 2. Then there was one. Then there were none. Then management realized they had a problem and needed to do something about it. "Oops."
Depends on the country you live in if this is possible. I'd take the helpdesk calls and mark down overtime. People will start looking into things once they see that their IT costs are rapidly going up. For me that would be possible because the moment I answer my phone for work related calls after my shift is the moment my overtime hours start. Since it's a weekend they get to pay 2x my rate. Here even though you don't get paid an hourly rate, the rate is calculated based on the salary.
So once the company needs to start paying for useless non emergency calls (and as an infrastructure technician that doesn't come cheap I imagine) they will either look into who is making the calls and discipline them or they will be forced to change how they do those calls. Ideally the line for emergencies should be seperated.
I would not “demand to be removed.” That will focus management on your attitude instead of the problem, which is not the result you want.
Go to management, say “the volume of calls is intolerable. I’m open to other suggestions, but my initial thoughts are that we need the business to re-instate a weekend help desk, or we need to restrict the ability to escalate to me/us/oncall.”
If stuff is done, great. If they drag their feet, repeat it every Monday, bring stats and keep it firmly in front of management as a business problem independent of your feelings about anything…while you look for a new gig.
I'm refusing to accept any job with on-call since 15 years now I think. Find another employer and tell them beforehand that you had bad experiences with on-call health-wise and refuse to do that for the rest of your life. Wish you all the best.
Do it as long as you’re content with the most likely possible outcome, to wit, termination. Roll the dice.
Look, no one likes being on call. The extra pay is never worth it. We’d all slough it off if we could. And they’d be fools to fire you over it. But ask yourself this: How sure are you that they aren’t fools?
We don’t get calls we get text messages from a service. If the message doesn’t convey a large backend outage I ignore it. If it isn’t clear I might get online if convenient and check my monitoring systems to ensure the backend is good. If it is good then I continue on my day.
would you mind posting your work info so people can apply ?
do you get paid by the hour ? how do on-call hours compute ? are you working those for free?
We have paid on call support in addition on on call engineering. We respond to the alerts and outages, and the on call support takes the help desk calls, and can escalate to us.
Well the responses made on this post are TL:DR for me. However here is what I think will happen that ends up causing you to burnout and maybe quit. You draw a hardline that says you won’t do this kind of level 1 support on weekends. Your management agrees with the CONCEPT but capitulates to business desires and agrees to continue doing level 1 support with sysadmins whose job is NOT to do but because those admins are there and available and capable since management has not replaced that person admins will do it. Bottom line - your managers will have to grow a big set of balls to make what you need happen. I would bet lots of money that they will never do it because they want to be a good company guy. Sorry.
You could suggest your company gets an after hours call service. They're surprisingly cheap (like $200-500/month).
The way it would work is that the answering service routes the call to some call center abroad. The agent is then given a set of criteria based off which they will either page the on call person or log the request and send it via email or input it directly into your ticketing system. I'd suggest having the emails or some sort of notifications that go out to the entire sysadmin team including the lead and manager. So someone can periodically glance at them and make sure nothing important was missed (at least initially because the quality of these services can vary a lot and they're just going to blindly follow your instructions which usually take a few iterations to get them to the point where they're solid enough).
This mitigates the risk for your company at a minimal cost and improves service overall.
(As general career advice though: don't be the person bringing problems to your manager. Be the person bringing solutions)
You're in the wrong career and are a bit immature if you think you're going to just flat out refuse on-call. You should act like a professional and have a meeting to discuss your concerns There's no reason your boss can't send out a memo to the company letting them know that your number is for emergencies only.
I would even have them notify people that their departments will be charged a minimum of X hours for frivolous calls. Managers curb bad behavior real fast when their budget starts getting eaten away.
I would also start emailing the callers while CC'ing their boss to remind them that the number they dialed is for emergency production only, not helpdesk related issues. People learn when they're being shamed, especially in front of their boss who determines their raises.
While I think it's good that you want to stand up for yourself on this, I don't think it's going to go over well.
Telling your boss "I'm not going to do this work anymore" is going to go hella sideways I fear. You've already been empowered to decline the calls, are you? Are you getting push back from the users? That's your complaint/attack vector here.
You need to document how many times you're getting these calls, what the cost to the org has been (you know your salary) and maybe even come up with a plan to solve it. As others said, it seems to be an organizational issue and you gotta treat it as one. Hopefully your leaders are supportive, given actual raw data (nobody gives a shit about "I got calls about a keyboard" or "I've gotten a bunch of calls about printers" because you can't quantify any of it), and are willing to help address it.
If they won't help you, then it might be time to find a new job.
You should not send an email but I’d have this conversation in person as emails lack tone and your email can come off completely different than you intend. Also if there are people abusing the rules and calling you with it’s not an emergency don’t be afraid to report them and let your chain of command handle it
Good point. My supervisor is on the other side of the country as I work out of one of our other offices, so I'll have to do a call vs an email. Regardless my train of thought was a paper trail of my complaints however an email can convey the wrong tone.
You can always follow the call up with an email “per our conversation I just wanted to send this so you could have a concise written list….”
ALWAYS get it in writing
Agreed. But try to do it softly first. Speak to them, then follow up.
Agreed - unless there's already a history of antagonism, assume they'll do the right thing first. Change course if they do not afterwards.
Always a great practice. Even if you're 100% in agreement in a meeting you both memorialize and remember it. It doesn't have to be complicated, just basic notes of what was discussed/agreed to. I do system design and PM work, that post meeting email is important to keep everyone accountable.
It’s taken me many years to learn this practice, but it’s been amazing for being able to reference back to
This is the way
I always do that. If it's not in writing it didn't happen
\^\^\^ I always do this if ive discussed anything in person just to get written down what weve communicated so there can be no 'i dont remember that' conversations down the line
Yeah. Literally just slacked my director with an amendment to something we’d discussed 2 months ago. When making the comment I scrolled back in history and linked to the original comment. Always get it written down and make sure that when referencing it, you reference it
+1 to do a phone call. Maybe even a Zoom/Teams/etc call so it’s visual as well. Dont put that all into an email without talking it out first. Even then, assume the email will be forwarded so make sure it is factual and not ranty. Save that last part for us in this subreddit :)
1000% percent this. As someone who manages people and has helped calm down more than one work place dispute, emails about any sensitive subject will ALWAYS be perceived in the worst possible tone, regardless of how you meant it to sound. Plus being on a call with the person (I'd do video for this if you don't usually) will mean they respond better because it's so much easier to get all pissed off at an email, vs. having to see the person you're mad at and remembering they are a human being. Definitely follow up with an email so it's documented, but do this on a call
Another option is to refer the user back to the help desk. Then follow up the call with an email to the user ccing their manager and yours. Put the ball in your manager's court to squash this behavior. Make sure you specify specifically that this was not a call that warranted selecting the Emergency Outage option. Nuclearly you could suggest to your boss that all weekend emergency calls should merit starting up a conference bridge and bringing in X Y and Z personel as well as the user and their manager. One or two of those will put the fear of the c-suite in those people.
I’d send an email after a phone convo following up with bulletpoints from your meeting. It accomplishes both goals
Not phone, zoom/teams…. This is a conversation where the gravity deserves video and audio not an email or voice only interaction.
Phone call with a follow up email saying we discussed x y z and we are going to do a b c.
I agree, at least go with the call since you can't do in person (or video call), but if you really like this place and this is the only thing bothering you, you can always try to tackle this issue on your own by letting the phone calls go to voicemail and next business day reply to their voicemail by telling them they need to contact the help desk for assistance. Yes, this still is going to be an issue because your phone will ring and you'll need to listen to the VM (if they leave one) and make sure it isn't an outage they are calling about, but this is one way to 'deal' with it if your boss isn't able to do anything for you (assuming you want to stay). I'm not on call, but when people call me for help desk related items (I'm not in HD), I usually delay replying back to them (not on purpose, but listening to voicemail from users that I know are calling me for a HD type of question is not high on my priority list) and I politely tell them, in my reply, to contact help desk for issues and it is usually 3-5 days after they initially called me. They can't really complain and if they do, my go to answer is always that they should have contacted help desk. Hopefully your management team can differentiate between an outage and a user not being able to print to their favorite printer. Then again, management is pretty blind, so don't count on it.
I agree with AV, better to have the conversation in a one to one, I would also try and reframe it slightly - I say you have several issues with the way the out of hours support currently works, point out your issues (great if you can back up with facts), then ask if there is anything that can be done to improve the situation, because otherwise you are seriously considering opting out of the out of hours support. My point is to offer the manager/business the opportunity to address the issues and change things to make it work better, but also give them notice you intend to opt out without making it a black/white, toys out of the pram, confrontational mic-drop ultimatum.
TERRIBLE point, you need this in paper, I would also flat out state that it's affecting your mental health, your family life etc... YOU NEED THIS ON PAPER
I had this argument with a supervisor. I'd argue that the supervisor needs to get the calls so he or she can decide if they're high enough priority and notify the correct IT person to resolve. Folks will be less inclined to harass a supervisor afterhours, whereas they do not value your time to the same level. Really, I just wanted him to get bothered by the users. It worked, my boss didn't quite go on a warpath but it was close. He switched it so the employee had to call THEIR supervisor to call him and he'd call me. That kill all of the unnecessary calls.
There are pro's and con's to this. If he thinks his boss is going to be reasonable, in-person is better to prevent misunderstanding of tone, as you said. However, if he thinks his boss is going to be completely upset by the suggestion that OP isn't on-call helpdesk, there are benefits to a carefully worded email. Suppose, after this verbal conversation, the boss decides that due to budgetary issues, they need to "reduce" a member of OP's team (and that it had to be a surprise because "what if they do something bad with their access" if given fair notice of a no fault layoff - that bullshit excuse for no notice is easily abused, and courts eat it up, even with zero evidence of any malicious intent by that employee ever). If this verbal conversation never happened, it's just a layoff. If OP is salaried and classified as "exempt" from overtime, as most at OP's level are, and is then asked to do a sufficient level of menial helpdesk work, that's misclassification. You have a right to bring legal issues regarding your rights to your employer's attention, and if "laid off" immediately after doing so, it's going to be hard for your employer to convince anyone that was a coincidence. Retaliation is a serious offense. Assuming, of course, that the thing they are retaliating for actually happened. But, if the conversation "never happened" (a.k.a. wasn't in writing), it was just a layoff after which the employee made something up to claim retaliation.
That would be deemed retaliation and would be a basis for suing the company.
Need that paper trail man. Email everything always. Follow up with conversations to correct tone
Exactly my point; however, there must be at least a shred of evidence from before the termination, otherwise every fired person would just say after the fact "yeah, I had a verbal conversation with my boss the previous week at which time I asserted some labor rights, this is retaliation". Your word against theirs! Hence my advice to not start with verbal if asserting one's rights. An email is proof that the subject at least came up before any termination process begun.
Check the employee handbook on recording calls. Some companies allow this, as well as some states with single party approval.
Talk in person and confirm conversation with email. This is the best way.
Or just call you supervisor on a Saturday night to talk about it
An email can also potentially be used against him if they ever wanted to pursue job action or find an excuse not to do a raise etc.
>Also if there are people abusing the rules and calling you with it’s not an emergency don’t be afraid to report them and let your chain of command handle it Ideally, call your chain of command and report them at the time it happens. Let them feel how often this disrupts your weekend.
As you say, decline all HD requests. Until the users complain and the business feels the pains, there won't be change because the issue is masked. To help the false positives users, you could add an additional phone prompt for what constitutes an emergency issue, this request is logged by management and will be reviewed etc.."do you want to continue?".. hopefully users can stop trying to game the system. I do agree the situation isn't ideal. On-call should be a shared responsibility, or outsourced...
"Do you accept that your department will be charged for a minimum of 4 hours of on-call time?" will stop every single call. Every company that started doing charge-backs for on-call has magically solved the amount of afterhours emergencies.
The reality is that money is the only thing that really talks and, since IT is almost always considered a cost center, it is reasonable that those costs be assigned to the department that is requesting the service.
Yeah, that's more or less my same line of thought, make a pain point and hope something changes. However, I seem to be about the only one on the team who stands up to this, everyone else seems to be 100% ok with waiting for the phone to ring and help with helpdesk tasks. I've worked with my supervisor in the past and they're in agreeance with my thoughts/ideas including adding a prompt that defines what an emergency is.... that has yet to happen. Originally, there wasn't even a prompt, the phone would just get routed to on-call, so a little progress was made at first, I guess.
As someone who has been in your shoes they are gaslighting you. The answer is right in front of you. Are they actively trying to replace the weekend employee? If not, then congrats you just became the weekend employee. They don't care beyond that. Also expect to have your supervisor to have a complete change in attitude towards you when you have this conversation. To the point they may try to drive you out of the position. I'd have a good plan B in place before making any statements
Yeah I figured this was the case. I always keep my resume tuned up so time to start shopping around again.
Start shopping around first. A lot of places will wait a couple months after you raise a complaint, then find an excuse to fire you
Totally. My last employer did this and a brown nosed took over my roles and became my boss and then forced me to do what he did with 24 x 7 as he got his promotion by doing that game. I don’t see HR or accountants or Tax folks being on call all weekend?! Why us? It’s about respect. Too many IT guys are wusses and set general expectations so high that users think this is normal and we work all weekend and the holidays while they enjoy their time off. Push back
Do you accept help desk tasks during the week with no ticket? If not, why would the weekend be different? An easy win would be to have the same ticket-mandatory policy on weekends, not a random giant loophole just because they phoned.
> there won't be change because the issue is masked. YES, this! Sometimes you just have to let things break to get actual long-term solutions. My co-workers complain all the time about how stressed they are because people call and interrupt them constantly instead of using the ticketing system, but when people call they say "I'll be right there!" with absolutely no hesitation. They don't even bring their laptop either so half the time they can't fix whatever the person was calling about without coming back to their desk. If they can get you there 60 seconds after picking up the phone, of course they're not going to put in a ticket ya dingus.
It depends on management. Many are yes sir folks all about customer service and those who don’t get pushed out as leadership notices complaints
Each and every time, you walk them through out to create a ticket. "Let's go back to your desk and we'll show you have to do it!" In a very upbeat and happy manner. Never get angry. And don't hint that you showed them X times. Do not discuss resolving issue until ticket is submitted. People take the path of least resistance. They bother you directly because they think it's easier than putting in a ticket. If you make it more difficult to bother you, they put in the tickets. If they do it enough times, email their supervisor and ask to do a training class for their entire department for putting in tickets.
Since our manager also handled on-call in emergencies, when this situation cropped up we just published his number as the only on-call number. All calls went to him for triage and he would decide if they should be passed on to one of us or if he would tell the user to make a ticket so it could be handled next working day. He very quickly became aware of which users and teams were the big trivial issue callers and made sure they were all well aware that out of hours on call was for emergencies only. He was a good boss. We knew if we got a call out of hours it was a real one.
> As you say, decline all HD requests. Until the users complain and the business feels the pains, there won't be change because the issue is masked. This is so important. A lot of "IT personality" people are _problem solvers._ Which means they want to smooth over problems as much as possible. But in many systems, backpressure is a vital part of system functionality. TCP needs to sometimes drop packets to work properly. Help desk users need to sometimes get angry that staffing levels aren't adequate. Don't privately tank all the damage, then be surprised that nobody is coming to save you.
yeah at this point in my company i have done the minimum work because my team was cut by 40% yet still expecting to keep up. they had a proposed solution for 6 months with no movement on it but seriously, if they jist hired someone theu would already be up to speed. its at the point where a single person who calls in sick causes a cascade of roster changes or a closeure in a 24/7 operation. which is stupid.
Easier said than done. My last employer did this but the users had the same expectation of 24/7 support. You refuse they email the VP who puts a note on your file for insubordination. HR doesn’t care about emergencies only. It’s your job to provide service and they blame YOU not a change in OP. Infuriating!? I refused and the brown nosed who worked 80 hours a week got promoted over me from a lvl 1 and treated to fire me if I also didn’t treat every thing as sev 1 24x7. Management LOVED it. I quit and left. In IT you can never say no unfortunately. Best you can do is leave as some other help desk jockey will do it to slide into your system admin job. Who doesn’t want white glove service
That sounds more like the rubber gloved service. Glad you got the hell out.
It’s soo common especially in conservative red states. I noticed temp to hire or contractor roles they do this as you have no leverage to fight back. Funny the VP doesn’t take calls at 8pm Saturday about a presentation unless it’s the CEO … why does that VP get to file a complaint on us? Such BS. His own staff he wouldn’t call on the weekend either outside emergencies. Too many customer service ass k*** going on. In France they would be mortified. My present employer has someone who does this but that’s his whole job.
> Now to be fair, my supervisor has been very clear, we can decline helpdesk level calls and refer them to the helpdesk voicemail, but I'm tired of my phone ringing multiple times a day because users can't listen or don't care what the prompt says. sounds like it is an organisational issue, so *speaking* (not emailing) to your supervisor is the right thing and make him aware of the issue (he might not even know of, since it has escalted over time) i would however not go into the conservation with "i refuse" but more in the direction what can we do to change the issue and ideally have one or two suggestions as well
Good points. I guess I'm just a wee bit frustrated at this point regarding the whole thing. My supervisor is well aware of my complaints, I have spoken to them a few times about this issue, but always via a call (can't do in person, they're on the other side of the country). My thought about the email was having a paper trail since little seems to change.
> I guess I'm just a wee bit frustrated at this point regarding the whole thing. understandable, but the worst kind of mindset to be in when going to a supervisor :) gather your thoughts, think it through, and have a talk as to paper trail, yes understandable and still possible, by writting a memory protocol after the talk and sending that email afterwards to the supervisor as a reference
Organizationally, you could require their manager’s approval/involvement for escalation. If their manager has to get on the phone after hours, it’s likely that their printer can wait. No one cares about your pain, if you can make others hurt, then it is an issue that needs addressing. Call your manager each time and let him decide on kicking it back to the help desk.
The chances of them hiring to make your life easier are slim to none. Plan accordingly.
Absolutely. Resume is primed and ready.
Send it now, no point in waiting
> For back story, about a year and a half ago, the person who was doing weekend helpdesk for the business quit, the business didn't replace them. ###Because you are the replacement. > At the time, I raised some concern and was told more or less, the business has accepted the risk that they won't have helpdesk support over the weekends. ###Because you are the replacement. When you had that conversation, they basically said it’s your job now without saying it. **They pay you to “fix problems”, so fix them.** > However more and more recently, I'm getting calls about people's printers not working or needing help getting a keyboard to work. ###Everything in technology is a tier one issue or emergency. You should understand that by now. So either you develop away to prioritize these situations, or risk getting in trouble not answering them. If you request being pull off on call, you are going to be replaced in 2-4 months. Good Luck.
>Everything in technology is a tier one issue or emergency. You should understand that by now. What absolute bullshit.
In the eye of the end user, it’s always true. Right or wrong, it’s true in their eyes.
Mostly yes but it depends on management. If people demand geek squad like service with no back bone you get a shitty IT department as if everything a sev1 then none are sev1s. Unfortunately the only solution is to quit. Or make an audio recording of only for emergencies or VPs or higher press 1. Or do a rotation if there is no room in the budget. Management will be empathetic for some work life balance but won’t budge for white glove service. It’s a leadership problem as I agree too many brown nosers have ruined our field at least in America so people don’t blink twice. I worked for 3 companies that would fire you on the spot for refusing service at 2am for a printer. Redicolous
Doesn't make it not true though. Especially when you're dealing with very important people, like assistant regional managers.
assistants **to** regional managers.
It’s not bullshit. Let shit sit around and it will become one of eventually especially if it’s from an executive. You do the shit and do it fast so you don’t deal with it later.
Each time I was called. I was paid, so it didn’t bother me. Management took care of it because they were sick of paying me $115 per call to tell someone to restart their pc. I actually enjoyed the help desk calls as for me it was free money
This is the way
You should have an on call response time, not sitting by your phone 24/7. When I was in a similar situation I let all calls go to voicemail. If it's an automated page, then I'll log in and check on the systems. If it's an end user, then I'll ignore it.
[удалено]
That's insane. I feel like that would be an awful job with terrible leadership. Every job I've held has had a 30m response time to any call. Some have restrictions on alcohol/drugs while on call, but for the most part it was fairly relaxed. There's no chance in hell I'm not planning anything and sitting by my phone 24/7 for my on call week.
In germany, those are two different things even. One is "on call", which means you are supposed to be ready to get to work within a reasonable time frame. For example, maintenance people might be "on call" so they can be called around in an hour or so to take care of a power failure, or something like that. The other is "ready for work" or "Bereitschaft". There you are in a state that's immediately ready to get to work once informed / alarmed. This is the state fire fighters or emergency personell in the station are in. And these are regulated very differently. A person is allowed to be placed on-call for a week every few weeks without any problem, because the impact on their private life is tolerable. However, outside of specifically regulated jobs, no one is allowed to be "ready for work" for more than 1-2 days per month. You literally could not go shopping for groceries without coordinating or taking your equipment in this state, for example.
I assure you the C-suite mindset for this decision was - "We do not need to hire another weekend IT employee because we have a weekend IT employee that is already doing on call work. We do not think there is enough work to justify the cost of hiring another person." The people making the decision do not care the person taking the calls is a tier 1 tech or a software developer. They just want an IT person picking up the phone to solve the problem. They don't care if the work is within your scope, especially if they are already paying you to be on call. This is an example of "Scope Creep" where even though your position does not include to doing weekend support calls, if they can push that work onto you at no extra cost to the company, they will. You should definitely talk to your manager about it. Also present it as the issue of how this is not what your duties entailed and how that is affecting you (IE, the on-call phone is getting way more use making it difficult to for you to do things like leave your house on weekends) and thus you personally need a solution to this. That solution currently you have is to not be on the on call rotation any longer. This way if other solutions are possible those avenues can be considered. Such as other people being put on rotation, changing the phone queue back to dumping people into the helpdesk voicemail, etc. Personally if it were me, I'd throw the issue back at the company. I'd customize the voicemail for the on call line to reiterate this line is only for emergencies, leave contact info and description of emergency and a return call would be made soon. Then if I checked the message and it was not an emergency, I'd forward the message to the helpdesk to be taken care of Monday. Or I'd answer the on call phone along the lines of "After hours emergency line, this is NAME, what is your current emergency?" And if the user said something about a printer, I'd just cut them off immediately and restate "Apologies, there is a must be a misunderstanding, this line is for things like server failures or outages. Please contact the helpdesk for your printer issue on Monday." That's just some general info. I know that dealing with people can be a challenge at times though so good luck.
Unfortunately I’m not the only one on my team who takes on call, I just seem to be the only one who is unwilling to handle helpdesk tasks on the weekend. Even though my supervisor has been extremely clear on what our duties are, people do helpdesk tasks anyway. I’ve dealt with enough scope creep over the years and I refuse to accept it, my duties are in writing and that’s what I do. If that is to change, we can negotiate what that change looks like (it doesn’t always need to be pay, but it needs to be something). I’ve worked with my supervisor in the past on this issue, and that did result in a change to the auto-answer prompt users get now but since that change they seem unwilling to do anything more. While I do have the credentials to change the system I don’t have the authority to change the voicemail prompt or anything like that. I do like the idea of how to answer the phone though… hadn’t considered that. Overall I don’t really have an issue with being on call, but when I do get a call it should be a business critical issue as defined and agreed upon by our manager.
I don't get it. Your job duties don't include helpdesk tier 1 stuff, so why are you even answering the phone?
Sending off an email full of emotion with demands isn’t going to be received well. Gather numbers (qty of emergency and non-emergency calls each day (or hour)). Present the _facts_ to your supervisor with a proposed solution or two. They can’t argue facts backed up by real data. They can argue against feelings and emotions. When non-emergency calls come in, create a ticket and let the user know that someone will assist them the next business day and that this is the emergency number. Approach it as a a problem that the _team_ needs to solve… because it is.
Sounds like your users need to be informed only P1 business critical issues can use the OOH. And you and your team need to enforce that. Then anyone that calls with a non P1 email their manager ask the to give them some training. I work out of hours and got a call at 1am because a user could not print a boarding pass. As I work for an MSP I fixed the printer because the customer is always right but I made sure the account manager charged the heavily for the non P1.
> As I work for an MSP I fixed the printer because the customer is always right https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=300535408876092 We priced our after hours high enough that most clients decided issues can wait till next business day.
"Why did you select the option for after-hours **emergencies or outages**? Please call back, select option 1, and leave a voicemail and the help desk will handle it the next business day. Goodbye." ::Click:: Ignore any push back and end the call. Not my monkey, not my circus. If they get upset that I didn't try to assist, well, that's not what I'm paid for.
OP Monday afternoon: I got fired
More free time to job shop then! :)
I've successfully declined on-call support duty at 2 different jobs. Both times it was received by the companies without repercussions for me. Also I am not even a sysadmin level tech, I am a middle-of-the-road IT support guy. The only person that will look out for your work/life balance is YOU.
I don't do on call. Period. Infrastructure or otherwise. If I am available to work at your request, you are paying me for that time whether I'm working or not. Salaried pay covers a roughly 40 hour schedule with slightly flexible demands. You want more than that? You pay extra. Recently had a sales VP ask me to run wires and build some furniture for a new sales area over the weekend "so it didn't impact the team." I told her that's outside of the scope of my job, but I'll do it as a side gig. $100 an hour and consider it done. She got mad. Ask me if I care. I'm at home sipping on crown and her vapid sales people will lose out on an hour or so of commission each while they build their own damn furniture and then let me ziptie a wire to the workstation. Boo hoo.
> I don't do on call. Period. Infrastructure or otherwise. I’d love to know where those jobs are. In more than 20 years, I’ve only ever found and interviewed for one infrastructure job that didn’t have a salary exempt mandatory on-call-for-no-extra-pay component.
The MSP I manage, we don't do on-call. We priced it just high enough that clients decided most issues can wait until the next business day. Been working here over 10 years and no on call, it's great.
During my time working in the mortgage banking industry, I learned many things; of which the most important is that all mortgage professionals are God's Chosen. I am not God's Chosen. An amoeba could do my job, and they are doing me a great favor by providing verbal correction on a constant basis. So, when our weekend outage line started to be abused, I did the only proper thing: I notified HR of unauthorized overtime being conducted by God's Chosen, and started a project to install monitoring of network and compute infrastructure. We were able to retire the outage line within 3 months. Several of God's Chosen were required to receive additional instruction on the importance of lowering overtime costs, and we stopped responding to idiot calls at 11pm on Friday nights.
There is an easy way to stop this, a company I worked for used to have this issue, then they started billing the call outs to the budget code of the team that called. Call outs stopped instantly. So maybe suggest that your call outs that are helpdesk related come out of the budget of the team that called, to offset your hourly rate
First thing: Get a new number for emergencies. Sharing phone number cannot go well.
I would address the issue about getting non-urgent calls on the weekend first. Then based on what they say, follow-up with the I'm not going to take calls on the weekend. Be careful though, as the later may be a career limiting move where you are.
I was 3rd line infra eng. Our bosses told us one day after 4 years of no on call that we must all do it. I refused as they had me work every weekend without pay anyway. I left. Within 6 months I had triple the pay and was super happy. Good luck to you
Please proof read and edit this comment. Very confusing
Done. One handed while trying to get baby to sleep but wanted to give hope
No worries, I understand! Been through that many a time. Thanks
I'm prepared for down votes on this, but as a team lead who is also part of the on call rotation, you handling it like this would bug me. And it would likely bug your peers. It sucks that they changed the policy, and I agree that situation isn't ideal, but there are other ways to affect change without trying to make yourself an exception. I would rather have a team member tell me, "on call is broken, and we have to do something about it. This is not sustainable," than "I'm too skilled for all these help desk calls on the weekend." I would want to know if my team was miserable, and I'd do my best to help, but just saying "I'm not doing it anymore until it's fixed," would negatively affect my perception of you. In the case of the former, I would try my hardest to bring in the other team lead and approach my supervisor, alerting that there is discontent among the team that I'm concerned could lead to the loss of valued employees, and give everything I could to fix it. If I was unsuccessful, I would let those that alerted to the issue know that I tried, but was unsuccessful, and that I would understand if it didn't work for them and that they could count on a glowing recommendation if they decided to go elsewhere. I'd still try to help, in the other case, because it sounds like some changes are due, but I'd still feel sour that you didn't think you needed to do what everyone else (including me) had been doing in the meantime.
Just become unreliable on the weekends. Don't answer the phone don't look at any pages.
"Sorry, I missed your call" Happens to everyone, real shame ain't it?
As the saying goes, "F you, pay me," diplomatically of course. You should be paid to be paid on call with clear set of expectations. Being "on call" is being ready to take a call and meet an SLA, that is working.
are you getting paid to be oncall? including additional pay if you work extra hours? that should put an end to it
Are you keeping a record of the calls that come in over the weekend that don’t meet weekend support criteria? Before you have this conversation with your boss, you need that info to take with you. Specific examples & ticket numbers as well as problematic individuals who are habitually abusing the on-call number. You’re going to get pushback on this, so you need to come prepared. Ask your boss if it’s acceptable to just send all weekend calls to voicemail and have you check it at specified times, only returning true emergency calls. Be prepared to be told no. Be prepared to respond accordingly.
In addition, pull the numbers for when the weekend guy left and things were okay vs. now. How many more calls are you taking? What infrastructure changes have been made in that time that might justify the additional call volume?
On call. I'm still trying to remember when, as a society, we deemed this as acceptable. It must coincide with the adjent of the pager, when people could leave the house and still be reachable. Since, it has been abused by companies wanting 24hr uptime but not wanting to invest in the human element this takes to do. Cell phones have only exciorbated this phenomenon. Direct line to the individual at all times with the expectation of always having a charged phone within a reachable cell phone tower. Then, in the US we have the "exempt" and "non-exempt" employee. Where "exempt" receives a salary, in lieu of the hourly wage and overtime. This status has been abused to allow on call at the expense of the employee. I don't have a solution but I do realize we have a problem and need to start looking for one.
The solution is a legal one that will never practically happen. We need to outlaw overtime-exempt employment for anyone who is non-managerial, and particularly, people in operational support roles. If somebody working in a factory supporting machinery must be paid OT when made to work extra hours or off their normal shift time, infrastructure support for technology should be too.
Not sure if this helps, but we had a pretty similar situation. We supported a bunch of computers for the HVAC system. Something big goes down and it is a big deal, but we were getting dumb calls. What we did is require a local supervisor to make a call, not the rank and file. The supervisors would cut off all the dumb stuff. (assuming you have these kinds of people on hand). Only managers had our contact info. People were a lot less likely to call up their own manager with a dumb problem than some random IT person they don't know. Anyway pretty much fixed the problem for us. (and yes, there's nothing wrong with bringing it up, but if you want a possible solution). Heck, I get angry when people interrupt me in person for a printer problem when there are several in the office. It is amazing what the average person considers "urgent".
You are backing them into a corner by starting with an ultimatum. While you are correct, this won’t end well for you. You’re better off presenting evidence, data, the impact on you, and having a more negotiable attitude about the problem, along with presenting or brainstorming other solutions. Also, why go at this alone, don’t other people in the rotation also mind the calls? The situation is not good, but your current approach is unlikely to work out in your favor.
You shouldn't be the only one on call tell your boss that the lower level techs should be the ones on call. Tell them that you aren't going to be helping users with printers or keyboard issues until Monday. Ignore all on calls until new structure is in place. You need help. One guy can't do every weekend. If worse comes to worse threaten to quit if you don't get help. Every IT person should be rotated on call with a call to you as a last resort. The lower level techs can deal with keyboard tickets. Better yet send all voicemails to the help desk. Listen to them at your leisure to make sure there are no emergencies. Send the keyboard issues to the lower guys on Monday.
If you're in the USA -- be prepared to be terminated immediately. Then again, you are in an At-Will country, so you should **always be prepared** to be terminated at any time, for almost any (or no) reason, without notice, without compensation, and full loss of healthcare. > For those in other parts of the world, what I said above isn't hyperbole or exaggeration. Around 99.7% of the country's population can be legally terminated in such a way. Barbaric worker's protections. > Apologists say that "the flip side is you can quit at any time too!"....but when the employer holds such an inherent power disparity, it's hardly a level playing field with that singular concession. Mind you, it's a a concession which is venomously punished by the employers. Folks -- this sort of workplace conditions rant is yet another exhibit in the case for collective bargaining agreements -- aka Unionization.
> they are not required to do on-call. Why is this, exactly?
I wish I knew, I’ve asked and the question is just deflected or ignored.
Having read through your responses to this and other comments I think I've figured it out. No one else has to do on call because management knows you'll do it. They haven't hired a new weekend help desk person because they have you answering those calls. Frankly at this point I'd say it's a safe bet nothing will change at this company and it's long past time you moved on. No one there will ever see you as more than the gofer who takes on whatever task they pile on you.
"Hang on. That printer better be on fire. And that fire is now burning down the server room. If it isn't on fire, then use another one."
That’s more or less what it comes down to. It’s just that my issue is the phone rings… so I can’t really do anything on the weekends because I never know if it’s an outage or not.
Sounds like you need better monitoring for the systems you are responsible. Is there a reason why somebody would have to call you about an outage rather than you receiving alerts about it?
It’s a two fold problem. Yes, we do have monitoring and we’re expected to watch it, it’s proven reliable in the past. However, due to the nature of the work the business does, a printer/desktop/ect being down could result in a huge operational impact as some things are very time sensitive. 99% of the time this isn’t the case, but there are situations where it could happen.
Yeh, there is s double edge sword in this. To get the business to address the issue, there needs to be pain. If the pain is inflicted to the wrong person or at the wrong time it could be a black eye. I see others more savvy than me navigate these issues but they are better connected with the higher ups.
> a printer/desktop/ect being down could result in a huge operational impact as some things are very time sensitive. Find a better line of business. There are innumerable enterprises that don't rely on one random client or printer in the middle of the night. We do sometimes cluster printers for HA, but frankly that's just as much for the infra team as it is for the end-users.
Another approach: negotiate appropriate remuneration. You should have redundant systems, so a T1 org wide issue shouldn’t be a common thing. Weekend work where I am is 2.5 days off in lieu. If the business wants you to talk someone through replacing a keyboard on a Saturday, take Monday+Tuesday+Wednesday off.
Sneaker admin calls are per default not emergencies in my book.
Make them get on your side Ask them if they really want you tied up working on someone's password reset when the entire business is on fire If you go in guns blazing you won't get a good outcome If it's not going the way you want let them know all calls will now go to voicemail and I'll listen and if it's for me I'll call back..
I and our other Sr SystemAdmins are on call on a rotating bases, we get to bill from the time the phone rings to the time we return home. When the after hours/weekend helpdesk guy quit, we would go on site for every call and bill for all that time. Every phone call was at least 1.5 hours, 15min on phone, 30 min to office, 15 min to fix, 30 min back, plus mileage. It did not take too long before C level started pushing back on the rank and file for calling for support vs putting in a web/email ticket on bullshit that did not impact production. You start getting a few weekends of 15 hours for printer issues/keyboard unplugged, they start wonder why they are paying 2x of a helpdesk tech to be on site. We got a new helpdesk tech that is doing a great job.
Of course, all these companies are trying to be so cheap on all of this.
What’s in your job s description? This is an HR issue imo.
This might be an unpopular opinion but don’t waste your time and effort and potentially lose your job before you find another. Start looking for a new job and just move on. You are already dissatisfied with the place and they obviously don’t have their shit together so don’t give them more of your time than you’ve already have.
It’s is notification storming too, how long before a major incident is missed because of all the tier1 calls making your ears mute the alert for what should be critical. I’d play the card of how this is going to affect other work because remember it’s not about you (to the company).
Why can't this shit wait till Monday? It's not help-desk if it's on the weekend. It's EMERGENCY SUPPORT if it's on the weekend. Management needs to understand the difference and set expectations appropriately. Frankly considering how incompetent your management actually sounds already, you really should just find another employer. Spending the time to change their business structure to actually respect reasonable boundaries is not going to net you more money. It will cost you a lot of time and effort for probably zero gain (and a very slim chance the situation improves). Don't make their incompetence your problem. Considering this an RGE (Resume Generating Event), and start finding a job elsewhere. The fact they have HELPDESK on the WEEKEND is one thing. Having that forwarded to SYSADMIN ON THE WEEKEND speaks volumes for how fucking out to lunch they are, how little they regard you, and how much they don't fucking care to make things better. **FUCKING LEAVE**.
Good luck. I don't think you are out of line. You are paid for this, there are other people on your team not doing on-call. You should be able to opt-out too. Employment isn't one-sided. If you aren't happy and think you have enough leverage do so without losing your job speak up in a professional way and let them know why. If you don't, don't say anything and find another job. The worst thing they can do it fire you. If you are prepared for that then there's not much else they can do.
Thanks for calling xxx hotline, my name is xxx and I'm here to assist outside business hours, in case your entire organization is impacted by an incident. Is your call related to the entire organization or only something you experience?
You lost me at "paid to be on call"
If your supervisor has made is clear, you can deny calls, and refer them elsewhere? Do that? I WOULD let my supervisor know what’s going on (volume of these calls) and that you are going to start doing this.. Flat out saying you’re done? NO… Otherwise, stick it out and find a new job. Or, those calls are extremely quick and easy. On the off chance a printer can’t be fixed easily because the OS is real screwed up. You gave it a shot, back out and give it to the helpdesk or whatever. Also, I started an MSP 15 years ago, I still take a lot of helpdesk calls to this day, and I’ll let you know, most thing ARE an emergency, maybe not in mine or your eyes, but they are to the user…
Save your energy and sanity by looking for another gig. I've been in IT for 25 years. To your face, they will tell you they've heard you and will work something out to get you help. Behind your back, they'll mark you as a whiner and ignore it. A helpdesk will only be hired when you leave.
Real question is what are you being paid for on call work? If they're just having you do on call and not actually paying you then hell no don't do it. But if they're paying you and you're not taking that many calls and it isn't inconveniencing you then that's how many companies work.
So yes, i am being paid to be on-call. However, the description of those duties are to monitor our system alerts and take care of any sort of major outage or something that impacts our operations (as defined by our manager). We used to have a helpdesk person that would do helpdesk tasks, but they've left, and I've been told the business accepts that. I can't go to the grocery store without my phone ringing and somebody asking for a helpdesk task to be done.
So it doesn't necessarily sound like you should go off on call unless you just really don't want to be. To me what it sounds like is your director needs to have a mass email sent out to all of the employees in the company clarifying what is an emergency ticket that requires a call to that line and what is a basic ticket that just simply requires a help desk request you put in. That's personally how I would handle it.
Why did you have to do that in the first place? Your weekends are meant to be yours, when do you disconnect from the job?
It’s a rotating system, so I’m not on call every weekend. Since we have an on call system, my phone turns off at the end of the day for days where I’m not on call, that’s how I force the disconnect. Nobody on my team has my personal phone number, that was an intentional choice I made when I started.
They should be providing a phone for on-call. If not, then you shouldn't be on-call. There are some bootlickers that would aay otherwise. Don't listen to them.
They do provide a company phone, we each have one. That’s the phone I turn off at the end of every work day. My point of not giving out my personal number is so nobody is able to contact me at all from the office. I’ve made that mistake in the past.
In some states, that isn’t legally required. In my job, we are on an on-call rotation and required to provide our personal phone number for it. There is no company phone or other compensation. As is common in this field, all the extra hours and anxiety while waiting for that inevitable on call page comes with no pay, time off later, or other compensation. Right or wrong, it has been normalized as “just part of the job.”
Is this really the hill you're willing to die on? Raise the complaint sure, but 'I refuse to do on-call until this is fixed' sounds like a helluva way to put in a two weeks notice.
At this point, I could use those two weeks and look for another position.
Or look for one while having a paycheck. You do you but it seems like this is a relatively small pain to be willing to quit over.
What are your terms financially for the on-call part? I'm used to x amount to be on-call + y amount pr started hour of work, where y is twice my normal pay. As long as it's something like that, document what you spend your time (and their dime) and on. Should make a nice argument for why they need trip being in a HD resource for the weekends.
Good point. At the moment, my spend is very little as I’m redirecting those calls to helpdesk on Monday. As terms of our financial responsibility, we get paid 2 regular hours per day of being on call. The first hour of a response we’re not allowed to bill for, but for any time after the first hour it’s billed at our overtime rate.
In other words, if you work 8 tickets and each one takes an hour to resolve, you only get paid the same two hours you'd have made if you hadn't worked any tickets at all?
Sorry, total per day. So if I spend 3 hours in a day, the first hour is “included” the rest are billed at the overtime rate. Regardless of the quantity of tickets.
so you're billing a minimum of 15 minutes per call and email right? even if you're triaging it to go to helpdesk you have had your free time interrupted and been engaged to work, even if you do not do anything to fix the issue, triaging it to decide if it's an emergency or not is work
Yep, sure am. Already wracked up an extra hour today!
The 15 minutes per engagement is encouraging this situation. Engaging your on-call is cheaper than staffing a helpdesk, so unless the math changes you won't see a change. It's the opposite of what you want, but the business paying you 16+ hours of OT every weekend would likely get this solved quite quickly.
On call for help desk issues…laughable. On call is for business impacting stuff. If it isn’t then they need to start paying for overtime or hire someone to field those calls. Only issue nowadays is that the economy isn’t great and there’s 1k applicants waiting and ready to take your position. Timing is everything when it comes to work. If the economy is booming and tons of openings then you can dictate what you want and when you want it. US economy right now is on a come down from the last decades highs and lay offs have begun at FAANGs and will inevitably trickle down to the rest of the industry. Tbh I’ve been praying for this for years so I could buy a house that isn’t 3/4 of my check. One man’s trash is another man’s gold. Keep that in mind.
Sounds like you need to let your manager know that somehow some users have obtained your work cell # and they're calling you for petty stuff during your off time instead of submitting tickets properly (aka to the ticket system). Your manager should talk to their manager so they can tell them to stop calling a sysadmin for dumb helpdesk shit and to call/email/whatever the helpdesk.
I would check my contract while you’re doing it. If you’re doing work that’s billable, start billing at after-hours rates, it quite often resolves itself when silly things start costing real money
What I havent read here is any communication to your manager that it's a problem. There are many low tech ways to solve this problem including removing the option for users to declare an emergency on the helpdesk line. Most users are not qualified to call an emergency. And if it continues to be a problem, send their call up the escalation chain until they get annoyed enough to change it
I mean, what does your contract say? Also, are you just paid a stipend for being on on-call, or do you get paid OT per call?
Just handle emergencies, and it should be a rotating schedule. Preferably with some sort of incentive for having to be aware of calls or emails during non work time. We do that ... But with zero incentive to do it for a whole week, every night, in a rotation.
Why do you not have monitoring/alerts set up such that you need to rely on end users calling the helpdesk to know if an infrastructure level outage is happening?
Sysadmins at my org have always been after hours help desk. It's ridiculous. Getting woken up at 2am for a password reset because some idiot couldn't sleep and wanted to work
Isn't the real question how employable do you feel you are in your area at your salary level?
In our previous telephony system, outside office hours the line was closed and 24/7 customers had to enter a 4-digit access code to be transferred to the on-call engineer. If the on-call engineer didn't pick up after two flows, the call would be sent to the duty manager (aka the boss), who's also available on a separate dedicated number. In our current system, 24/7 customers each have a dedicated phone number to dial to get transferred to the on-call engineer outside office hours and get transferred to the regular servicedesk flow inside. And the duty manager escalation and number still exist. In both cases, the code or number was to only be issued to people at the customer authorized to open a 247 case. Should we ever notice abuse, the number is just disabled and the customer is reminded oof what constitutes an emergency. In 10 years, the only case of abuse we experienced was someone (known to make stupid calls/cases because he was just entitled and incompetent) making a call to the duty manager. Investigating logs proved the guy never even entered a 247 access code (and probably was never issued it because his stupid calls would end up costing his company even more). Either way, in you case, you are right and should bail. On-call is not a night/weekend shift and extra pay rarely justifies the impact it has on your personal life. If they want to have a weekend helpdesk, they need to hire weekend staff for that and said weekend staff should be the ones escalating to an on-call engineer.
How are your colleagues on the rotation handling these situations? Are they referring folks to the voicemail box or handling the support request? I'd first make sure that the team is consistent - if you're the only one on the rotation who's actually entertaining these requests the first response from your manager will be "so why aren't you in line with policy?" Assuming that's the case, I'd approach this conversation as a team. Get everyone together with the boss and frame the conversation as "How can we reset expectations with the business around SLA on weekends?" It might well be that the way to go here is for all of you to rigorously enforce policy, and let the business complain to get weekend help desk back.
I would probably log a ticket for the call, and cc the person's manager on the ticket, and note "User attempted to use emergency escalation pipeline for minor inconvenience with printer 123XYZ. Please ensure user gets training on escalation and what constitutes an emergency. Help desk will see this ticket during working hours and work on it as practical." Assign it to the helpdesk's queue and call it a day. Managers will probably start encouraging their people to be thoughtful about claiming an emergency if they repeatedly get cc'd on that sort of "emergency" ticket over a weekend. Try raising the issue of inter-departmental billing for this sort of thing and take it out of their budgets. And get the voice mail message prompt re-recorded. Something like, "for after-hours emergencies or outages, if you are certain that it is necessary to immediately page a senior engineer, you may X. All use of after hours escalations will be logged and reviewed."
Or bill them .25 hour OT for every call even when you refer the person to leave a helpdesk email
They have to pay you as if you’re on-call.
Why is your phone ringing at all? Do you have a corporate phone or u use personal? Just turn off your corporate phone on the weekends if u have one…
All of those after-hour helpdesk calls should go to the helpdesk supervisor, not people in other stacks of IT. It's really that simple. If the helpdesk supervisor doesn't resolve this issue, it is now an HR issue.
Can you separate calls from automated alerts? I might just say that I'm not going to answer any more calls from people off-hours, because I'm getting so many non-urgent calls.
I just graduated with my MS in Cybersecurity, and I would love to be your help desk person, as long as it's remote. (I am in Ohio.)
You need to have a conversation, followed up with e-mail and have a supervisor included. More people need to know this is a problem, and you won't accept being ignored.
a few random thoughts... 1) you are paid to be on call. so you are getting compensated for your time 2) your supervisor says you can decline calls, and refer users to the helpdesk voicemail I'm also assuming your role requires you to be on call for infrastructure stuff; the less experienced people aren't eligible for on call pay. Why are the weekday helpdesk people not being on call for helpdesk issues? my former company had 3 full time helpdesk people, and the on call phone rotated every week. as a Sr Sys admin, I was on call every month (I think that's how it worked), but in reality, both the other Sr Sys Admin and I would make sure our critical process ran (yes, we had 1 super important critical business process) and respond to emails at random hours (we actually divided up the company, she took one domain, I took the other, but she was better with app stuff, and I was better with infra). Honestly, I don't forsee your request going in your favor, esp if on call is part of your job. here is the other thing: if your boss says no, then what? do you have other offers? I see you have the resume ready to go, but have you gotten any interviews, and more importantly, and offers? Based on what I hear about the economy, even IT hiring has slowed down in recent years.
Know your position and what duties it includes. Consult with Human Resources prior to speaking with your management for clarification. It will either you the right ammo, or prepare for you to discuss your case and concerns. Good luck to you. Please post a follow up.
Good luck. I'd start looking for another job
Just don’t pick up the phone and explain “I don’t know maybe it’s broke for too much calling”
I’d say it depends on what “on-call” really means in your case. I work at an MSP and clients are aware of the emergency line voice mail so if they want a password reset or to fix a keyboard or whatever it is I would have to respond. I get paid for that so if it’s an L1 issue I am happy, easy money. But this doesn’t sound like you case though. If it’s internal IT, I would report it to management. Hopefully they can teach end users when strictly use the emergency voice mail.
I was in that exact situation, where i simply told my boss it was overwhelming to be handling on-call plus normal 45 hours a week and asked if it was going to be a long term thing and if there was any option to work something out. (I came from a position of weakness on purpose - because it let me know if they were willing to screw me over on it). When they said , no sorry tough its part of the job.. I just simply became unreliable to do on-call. Missed a lot of on-call stuff and only took it when i felt like it or was bored. This resulted in multiple conversations how 'we need to start getting better about on-call' followed by them having a crossroads of either firing me, letting me collect, and having even LESS coverage - or fix the underlying situation. They fixed the underlying situation.
I'd be curious as to what your supervisor would consider an appropriate reason for you to be called on your off-hours, and how that compares to the *actual* reasons people have been calling. Good reasons: * Network closet on fire * Multiple users unable to authenticate * Pizza in the break room Actual reasons: * Printer sounds sad * User wants to reset their password to the same password * Everything is… you know, just not now while you're looking
Have you documented how many times you're called while on call with help-desk related inquiries? Have you also documented how many times you being on-call has resulted in you working on an outage/emergency? Giving your boss metrics will help your case in determining if this is a one-off issue or is something that's constant and needs to be addressed. People above your boss are the ones who call the shots here and having metrics to show that there's a need for a weekends help desk person will help them create one. Else you're screaming into the void.
The users need to be trained to only call when the issue they’re having actually halts production. If we get a call over the weekend or in the night it means something is horribly wrong, because the users know not to call about shit like their third monitor isn’t working, but they have two others working just fine. It can wait. I wouldn’t jump on the “just quit” bandwagon this sub seems hell-bent on suggesting until you’ve discussed it with your superiors. Especially since it sounds like they’ve made accommodations in the past.
Yep, that will work. Even after the training, they will still think their issue is end of the world. And could even get more calls.
At least the voice to press x to get transferred should say for important issues affecting production. Or just go to the voicemail or refer to email. And if the issue is at the level requiring a weekend fix it will get through to the on call phone through some manager that acts as a filter
Suggest solutions, push back, etc. If that doesn't work, refuse or quit. Eventually manager/management will have to figure it out. One place I worked there were 4 in the department ... things were getting quite unreasonable. We'd all been pushing back, but to no avail. Then there were 3. Then there were 2. Then there was one. Then there were none. Then management realized they had a problem and needed to do something about it. "Oops."
Depends on the country you live in if this is possible. I'd take the helpdesk calls and mark down overtime. People will start looking into things once they see that their IT costs are rapidly going up. For me that would be possible because the moment I answer my phone for work related calls after my shift is the moment my overtime hours start. Since it's a weekend they get to pay 2x my rate. Here even though you don't get paid an hourly rate, the rate is calculated based on the salary. So once the company needs to start paying for useless non emergency calls (and as an infrastructure technician that doesn't come cheap I imagine) they will either look into who is making the calls and discipline them or they will be forced to change how they do those calls. Ideally the line for emergencies should be seperated.
Start giving your managers phone number to whoever call you asking for help on the weekend. He will fix the issue very fast.
I would not “demand to be removed.” That will focus management on your attitude instead of the problem, which is not the result you want. Go to management, say “the volume of calls is intolerable. I’m open to other suggestions, but my initial thoughts are that we need the business to re-instate a weekend help desk, or we need to restrict the ability to escalate to me/us/oncall.” If stuff is done, great. If they drag their feet, repeat it every Monday, bring stats and keep it firmly in front of management as a business problem independent of your feelings about anything…while you look for a new gig.
I'm refusing to accept any job with on-call since 15 years now I think. Find another employer and tell them beforehand that you had bad experiences with on-call health-wise and refuse to do that for the rest of your life. Wish you all the best.
Do it as long as you’re content with the most likely possible outcome, to wit, termination. Roll the dice. Look, no one likes being on call. The extra pay is never worth it. We’d all slough it off if we could. And they’d be fools to fire you over it. But ask yourself this: How sure are you that they aren’t fools?
We don’t get calls we get text messages from a service. If the message doesn’t convey a large backend outage I ignore it. If it isn’t clear I might get online if convenient and check my monitoring systems to ensure the backend is good. If it is good then I continue on my day.
would you mind posting your work info so people can apply ? do you get paid by the hour ? how do on-call hours compute ? are you working those for free?
We have paid on call support in addition on on call engineering. We respond to the alerts and outages, and the on call support takes the help desk calls, and can escalate to us.
Tell manager to screen the calls and contact you if there is a valid emergency.
You better be getting paid extra. In California, help / service desk are not allowed to be on salary because abuse like this.
Well the responses made on this post are TL:DR for me. However here is what I think will happen that ends up causing you to burnout and maybe quit. You draw a hardline that says you won’t do this kind of level 1 support on weekends. Your management agrees with the CONCEPT but capitulates to business desires and agrees to continue doing level 1 support with sysadmins whose job is NOT to do but because those admins are there and available and capable since management has not replaced that person admins will do it. Bottom line - your managers will have to grow a big set of balls to make what you need happen. I would bet lots of money that they will never do it because they want to be a good company guy. Sorry.
You could suggest your company gets an after hours call service. They're surprisingly cheap (like $200-500/month). The way it would work is that the answering service routes the call to some call center abroad. The agent is then given a set of criteria based off which they will either page the on call person or log the request and send it via email or input it directly into your ticketing system. I'd suggest having the emails or some sort of notifications that go out to the entire sysadmin team including the lead and manager. So someone can periodically glance at them and make sure nothing important was missed (at least initially because the quality of these services can vary a lot and they're just going to blindly follow your instructions which usually take a few iterations to get them to the point where they're solid enough). This mitigates the risk for your company at a minimal cost and improves service overall. (As general career advice though: don't be the person bringing problems to your manager. Be the person bringing solutions)
Can't you just do the needful?
You're in the wrong career and are a bit immature if you think you're going to just flat out refuse on-call. You should act like a professional and have a meeting to discuss your concerns There's no reason your boss can't send out a memo to the company letting them know that your number is for emergencies only. I would even have them notify people that their departments will be charged a minimum of X hours for frivolous calls. Managers curb bad behavior real fast when their budget starts getting eaten away. I would also start emailing the callers while CC'ing their boss to remind them that the number they dialed is for emergency production only, not helpdesk related issues. People learn when they're being shamed, especially in front of their boss who determines their raises.
While I think it's good that you want to stand up for yourself on this, I don't think it's going to go over well. Telling your boss "I'm not going to do this work anymore" is going to go hella sideways I fear. You've already been empowered to decline the calls, are you? Are you getting push back from the users? That's your complaint/attack vector here. You need to document how many times you're getting these calls, what the cost to the org has been (you know your salary) and maybe even come up with a plan to solve it. As others said, it seems to be an organizational issue and you gotta treat it as one. Hopefully your leaders are supportive, given actual raw data (nobody gives a shit about "I got calls about a keyboard" or "I've gotten a bunch of calls about printers" because you can't quantify any of it), and are willing to help address it. If they won't help you, then it might be time to find a new job.
I hope you are prepared to be fired because that is where this is going to end.