[jokethrowaway]

I'd quit, there are plenty of companies that don't do that. Look into contracting maybe, I've never heard of a contractor being on call.

Sleep matters.

I wonder if maybe it's a FAANG thing that cheap startups try to copy?

We were on-call (a week every 3 months) with my last employer but it wasn't too bad and it was spread equally across people. It wasn't compensated but during the on-call you didn't do any product work, just improving monitoring and alerts so that being on-call didn't suck & recovering if something happened at a bad time.

Still, being on-call sucked because we had too many stupid monitors checking on trivial things that weren't important and that people were too afraid to touch.

A few other companies I've been at just have a dedicated infra team on-call, which gets paid more.

This sounds like a fair solution. I would've liked the extra money as a youngster and now I would gladly avoid messing up my limited sleep.