> What is the 'punishment' for not getting to a call on time?
There is no formal one, just more of an implication.
If you miss one page, people will notice, and you might get asked about it the next day. If it's just the one, it'll probably end there. But if it ever turned into a pattern you can be sure that you're manager would bring it up in your 1:1s (despite them not being on any on-call rotation of course). It would likely not be a fireable offense, but it'd be made very clear that there'd be an expectation for you to improve.
I suspect that this is more or less how it works at a lot of companies with similar setups.
At my company, if you don't check into an on-call ticket within 20 minutes your manager will get paged, who will then likely need to page one of your peers to actually fix the problem.
So it's not like you can just ignore it until morning.
There is no formal one, just more of an implication.
If you miss one page, people will notice, and you might get asked about it the next day. If it's just the one, it'll probably end there. But if it ever turned into a pattern you can be sure that you're manager would bring it up in your 1:1s (despite them not being on any on-call rotation of course). It would likely not be a fireable offense, but it'd be made very clear that there'd be an expectation for you to improve.
I suspect that this is more or less how it works at a lot of companies with similar setups.