Previous employer, we had to provide 7 x 24 hour support. Our system supported a world-wide business. We had 3 developers/support people on call, setup with a rotatine 1st, 2nd, 3rd on-call. If there was a problem, the operations staff would call the 1st on-call. If no response in 15 minutes, call the next on-call, and so on.

I had a greate supervisor during part of that time. When I was on-call, I turned off my pager when I was in church, and when on the pitch officiating soccer games, the pager was in my bag. If I could not be reached, there were 2 others who were supposed to be available. We actually had four developers in the rotation at one point, which actually gave us one week off rotation.

I really liked having the pager on weekends when I worked for Data General. We got paid 1 hour straight time for every four hours on-call with the pager. If we got called, we got paid appropriately for the hours worked. I was hourly, so depending on when I got the call, it could have been straight time, 1.5x, 2x, and even possibly 2.5 x.

They thought about having an operator care the pager for a week, but realized that would not be cost effective. Heck I'd have volunteered to caring all the time, if not called it would be an extra 32 hours pay every week.

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