[thesmallestcat]

Companies need to evaluate the loss of man-days when they demand or even suggest on-call duties for engineers. Also the effect of these duties on number of sick days taken, and overall health. Because when I'm up from 3-3:30am fixing something, I'm going to be less useful and emotionally testy that day at the office. When I'm a Good Marine and am up eyeballing a problem from 1am-6am, the same will happen but over a 1-2 week span. And I'll probably get sick.

I really think engineers end up on-call because companies give short shrift to documentation. Maybe if you afforded time to document systems and processes, you could outsource on-call duties, or trust sysadmins to remediate without developer intervention.