Out of hours support?

Homer-Simpson

Homer-Simpson

Homer-Simpson

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Does anyone here work in IT and support a/their business out of hours or have any experience with OOH support?

I am curious as to what is deemed the normal payment for being on call. Do you get x amount a month and then as soon as you pick up the phone you get overtime or is it calculated a different way? What hours do you cover? What type of support are you providing? Is your cover provided from in the office or can you support remotely? Are you expected to be able to get to site/not drink (at all) whilst on call?
 
We get £100 a month for being on call. There's 4 of us so we're only on call for a week during the month.

We get paid overtime for any calls we actually have to put some effort into resolving. We cover 5pm-10pm on weekdays, and 8am-8pm Saturday and Sunday.

We're not expected to be able to get on site, and 99.9% of problems can be sorted remotely.
 
Ascendancy said:
We get £100 a month for being on call. There's 4 of us so we're only on call for a week during the month.

We get paid overtime for any calls we actually have to put some effort into resolving. We cover 5pm-10pm on weekdays, and 8am-8pm Saturday and Sunday.

We're not expected to be able to get on site, and 99.9% of problems can be sorted remotely.
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What type of support are you offering? What is your job role?
 
I'd expect Time and a Half hourly rate when called plus a flat payment per night of on call, say between £25-50.

Depends on the job though.
 
Pretty much the same here 1 in 4 paid £100 per month (more if you are lucky as lunar as opposed to monthly) On top of that we get time and a half per call which we can take as paid or hours owed. However we only support till 8.30 at night and 8-1 on Sat

Mainly Desktop\Software Application issues but their are also some server problems (we deal with them if in our hours, otherwise the call goes to systems team who cover 24/7)
 
Company i work for has set up an out of hours support service. We support 5 clients ranging from 50-100 users each. From 18:30-23:00 and 08:00-23:00 on weekends. It is not a continuation of service ie we are not expected to clear calls in the queue unless they have been specifically passed over to the ooh desk due to the user needing to be at home to fix the problem and so on.

we get £50 mon-fri and £100 for sat and sun. Total £450 a week before tax. What makes it worth doing is that we don't get any calls. Like 2-3 a week sometimes you can go a whole week with only 1 call. They said if it started to get busy they would increase the fixed rate to an overtime rate.
 
Used to get a flat per hour fee for being on standby (about £1.80-ish) then if I got called out the first hour was free, then I got double time for each completed 20mins after that)

I was lucky as for some stupid reason no-one wanted to be on standby so I was the only guy in the team doing it, but i had to share it with 1 other guy from another team as they didn't want me on call pretty much all the time.

I wasn't on a very good wage back then so this really helped.
 
PistolPete said:
Used to get a flat per hour fee for being on standby (about £1.80-ish) then if I got called out the first hour was free, then I got double time for each completed 20mins after that)

I was lucky as for some stupid reason no-one wanted to be on standby so I was the only guy in the team doing it, but i had to share it with 1 other guy from another team as they didn't want me on call pretty much all the time.

I wasn't on a very good wage back then so this really helped.
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What type of role was that for? What type of calls did you get?

groen said:
Company i work for has set up an out of hours support service. We support 5 clients ranging from 50-100 users each. From 18:30-23:00 and 08:00-23:00 on weekends. It is not a continuation of service ie we are not expected to clear calls in the queue unless they have been specifically passed over to the ooh desk due to the user needing to be at home to fix the problem and so on.

we get £50 mon-fri and £100 for sat and sun. Total £450 a week before tax. What makes it worth doing is that we don't get any calls. Like 2-3 a week sometimes you can go a whole week with only 1 call. They said if it started to get busy they would increase the fixed rate to an overtime rate.
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What type of calls do you get through? Is it more network/infrastructure/critical application support?
 
We currently offer OOH support to customers. Its 1am to 9am Monday to Friday and you work a week at a time for a flat rate of £200 (£40 a night).

This is technical application support and we are 2nd line behind the customers own 1st line helpdesk and application support team, so while we rarely get any calls, if one does make its way through to us its going to be pretty serious.
 
Homer-Simpson said:
Does anyone here work in IT and support a/their business out of hours or have any experience with OOH support?

I am curious as to what is deemed the normal payment for being on call.

I have personally seen rates from as little as £180/week with no overtime for time worked to as high as £700/week with x1.5 for any time actually worked.

Do you get x amount a month and then as soon as you pick up the phone you get overtime or is it calculated a different way? What hours do you cover?

Anytime there is no support in the office, so anything outside 8am-6pm

What type of support are you providing?

Production support

Is your cover provided from in the office or can you support remotely?

I have worked on government contracts that didnt allow remote access, so you had to drive into work at whatever time to fix the problem.But you usally get remote access.

Are you expected to be able to get to site/not drink (at all) whilst on call?

While oncall you will be expected to remain fit and proper to be able to do your job.
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Homer-Simpson said:
What type of support are you offering? Do your helpdesk get paid the same as your network engineers?
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Answered a bit of this above, but we are not a 'normal' IT helpdesk. We offer technical support to a specific set of applications. We are 2nd line to all our customers behind their own support desk. So we would be the 3rd party that calls get passed to when their own IT team can't fix it.

Where I previously worked we had on call 1st line support and they got paid around £60 a week to be on call for all the time the helpdesk was shut (so everything outside of 8:30-17:00 Monday to Friday) and got all the 1st line calls like password resets and printers not working. That was an unbeliveably bad deal and I have no idea why they agreed to it (I was in a different team).

Where I work now and the OOH I do think is a fairly good deal as the pay reflects the fact that if the phone rings you may well be up at 2am with a business critical application down for a global company. If it was things like password resets and things they maybe you would get paid less, but then also I expect you would get a lot more calls?

It really varies between companies and the workload.
 
Homer-Simpson said:
What type of role was that for? What type of calls did you get?

What type of calls do you get through? Is it more network/infrastructure/critical application support?
Click to expand...

It is law firms and the ooh support are the 1st-3rd line on site support for those sites that do the service. So we have full access to all the systems and ooh will generally get basic queries regarding documents or citrix lockouts. If a user called in and reported a big fault with say citrix being down at one site, the guy would contact our senior technical manager who would contact the on site third line for that site and he would have to go to site and fix it if it could not be done remotely. But most server faults that have come through to the ooh have been fixed by the ooh by rebooting or restarting services or similar, after contacting the more technical in our team for advice in some cases.
 
Used to get 5k a year on a 1 in 2 rota plus the overtime if I spent anything more than a hour on a problem. This was supporting networks in a datacentre
 
Our on call is terrible tbh.
~£18 week day / ~£40 weekend day : rate
x1.33 per hour / x2 per hour : for any work done. Min 1 hour charge inc taking a call for the wrong team (if service team call you incorrectly you still claim it!)
 
£200/week. Hardly receive any calls, but they charge the customer for it so it needs to be in place. I do 2 weeks on, 2 weeks off.
 
When I was oncall it worked out at ~£258/week for being on-standby and then 1.5x (Mon-Sat) or 2x (Sun) if you were called out. Although you couldn't claim for the first hour you were working on an issue. Bank Holidays were at a slightly higher rate for standby and 2x. My understanding is that now the rates have increased by ~50% for standby since I did it last.

Used to work out quite well as I was on a small rota looking after some very stable customers (some months I did 4 weeks in 4 and you could go 2-3 weeks with out being called at all at times). You got the odd bad week but generally it was money for nothing.

When I stopped doing it they re-jigged the rotas and increased the standby rate (to get this you had to agree to a contract variation which I didn't like some of the other terms). Now I don't do oncall (my current role doesn't require it) but I can be called for advice (no dialling in, no voice conferences) and each call nets me ~£70. I think I've been called twice this year.
 
Due to the amount that we get paid for basically being available out of hours, we have 5 engineers that all want to do it and we had a big argument recently where the guy doing the rota was taking the shifts of people that were dropping out and he given himself 7 shifts and everyone else 3 and 2 over a 3 month period. So we only get to do it once every 5 weeks :( but £350 after tax is realy nice bonus every second month. :d
 
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