[Johnny555]

Because, math? That company may have a team of 5 developers, how do you split those 5 developers across 3 8 hour shifts that cover 24 hours/day 7 days/week + holidays + vacations + sickdays to get 24x7x365 coverage without doing an on-call rotation.

When you're in a 100 or 1000 person company, then it's easier to have dedicated after-hours support staff (or staff working from multiple timezones around the world)

No one is saying that it should be "free", it's built into the salary - every company that I've worked at that's had an on-call is very clear about on-call rotations during the interview.

[st3v3r]

"Because, math?"

Except you're saying that small businesses should get to ignore that math, and get stuff for free.

" That company may have a team of 5 developers, how do you split those 5 developers across 3 8 hour shifts that cover 24 hours/day 7 days/week + holidays + vacations + sickdays to get 24x7x365 coverage without doing an on-call rotation."

You hire more people so that you can, or you don't make deals you can't afford. Honestly, why is this so hard to understand? Why do you feel so entitled to things you can't afford?

[Johnny555]

Again, who said anyone is getting anything for free?

My company has 100+ engineers, all of whom do a on-call rotation, they are all aware of it when the sign up, so that on-call duty is included in their salary. The employee can evaluate for themselves whether or not they think the salary is sufficient to cover that, but as far as I know, we've never had a candidate turn down an offer due to the on-call requirement (though I don't know that they'd always tell us that's why)

But really, does any engineer join a small company (in the USA) without assuming that they'll be on-call after hours? Even in early stage companies that haven't launched a product yet, there's still after-hours support to be done to keep dev systems running, fixing broken builds, etc.