[lucaspiller]

A few years ago I worked at a company that paid £30/day for being on-call and £30/hour (or part thereof) while investigating / fixing incidents. We were usually on call for a week at a time with a rotation of around 6 developers.

We got SMS or phone call (we had a non-technical ops team that worked early/late monitoring systems and tried to do preliminary fixes) and were expected to be available and investigate 24/7. If you didn't acknowledge the SMS alert within 30 minutes everyone else on the team got it, so it was in your best interest to do so to avoid waking up everyone else :)

Some of the services we had were pretty critical, so the fix in that case was 'as long as it takes to get it working', and then putting in a permanent fix during business hours. For lower priority services, we'd just leave it broken and fix it during business hours. If you were up fixing something in the night you weren't expected to be in at 8am the next day.

In terms of escalation if there was a major problem that couldn't be handled we'd usually get in touch with a few other people on the team to get their input. This hardly ever happened though, the only time I can remember is when the ventilation system failed in a data centre which was !FUN!

After that I worked at a startup that didn't pay for any overtime or on call, which is one of the reasons why I left. Since then I've been contracting, so haven't had to worry about on call but I'd be happy to do it again for the right price.