[_diq5]

Want to jump in here - I have worked at a company where engineers are not on call for their code, and it was a living nightmare.

_You_ might not be on call for your code, but _somebody_ will be. Often some poor SRE/ops person that has absolutely no idea what the app is doing/or why it's failing in production.

Not being on-call makes engineers complicit. I've seen it all, known memory leaks shipped into production, apps where half the endpoints couldn't even be compiled, code dumping the production redis at 1AM ... and every time the pain just felt on deaf ears.

If your code is what wakes you up in the middle of the night, you have: - Incentive to fix/mitigate as soon as possible. - No blame game to play. Either the error was made by you, or someone on your team. It doesn't have to go up 3 rungs on the ladder then back down again.

I don't think the author was suggesting that everyone should always be on call, just that you _must_ be responsible for your own code in production

[ratww]

I'm always happy to help some poor SRE in the middle of the night, and I once even drove to the office in a rainy Sunday, in the middle of my vacation, to access IP-restricted stuff because a support intern messaged me on Instagram.

...but with that said: I'm glad I only worked in countries where work is properly regulated and "on call" means "I'm getting fucking paid every cent for each hour I _must_ answer that goddamn phone". Which in practice means there's no PagerDuty.

The unpaid on-call culture is bullshit. The company can either pay me or go fuck itself.

[_diq5]

I unfortunately work in a place where on-call is unpaid. I'm an SRE stuck in the 90s.

The policy states that only the Operations team gets paid on-call, because I guess in the old days they would be the expected to deal with production.

Fast forward to today, and the Operations folks are a small team managing 2 datacentres, and all on-call rotations between SREs and developers are considered unofficial and therefore not eligible to be paid.

One of our Sr. Managers tried to take this up the chain, but then got reprimanded for putting developers on-call.

[devdas]

Now apply the same rules to the SRE role as well.