[cookiecaper]

The middle ground is correctly configured alarms that follow team-specific escalation policies and wake up the right people.

FWIW, alarming systems aren't that flexible. The market sorely needs better solutions around monitoring and alarming. We use PagerDuty for this and it can be made to work with about 80% of our alarms, but it's a PITA. Also, on the topic of waking people up, the PagerDuty app conveniently includes several blaring, obnoxious alarms, but it frequently fails to receive push notifications, so it's not that rare for someone (or several someones) to sleep through the PDs. :|

I do understand what you're saying and I think most people actually are reasonably flexible as long as the occasion doesn't become common. But I wouldn't hold it against someone who's dangling from a mountain if they can't text back immediately (unless they're the on-call engineer that day).