[onewland]

If you work as an engineer in the US you're probably an "exempt" employee by status, meaning that your employer doesn't have to compensate you for extra time. If you're sufficiently underpaid as an engineer that you're non-exempt, then you should be paid 1.5x for any time beyond 9-5/40 hours, or you should get to trade in those unscheduled hours to work less on following days.

EDIT: Realized I didn't address the question of whether it is "standard". I've heard that DevOps engineers have a bit of a compensation consideration (maybe $10-20k/year in the Bay Area where I live) for the on-call nature of their jobs, but I am sure that they are mostly paid enough to be exempt employees. This is totally anecdotal/second-hand and it would not surprise me if their pay is at parity or even worse than other software engineers.

[hawkice]

Suffice it to say I was making $1X0k/year in a second tier American market (Chicago/Seattle/LA you know the deal), so I didn't feel underpaid per se -- more that, for those weeks when I was missing a lot of sleep, I got the sense it was a pretty raw deal.