[kenrose]

I'm probably piling on, but wanted to echo a lot of what's been said.

On-call responsibilities are supposed to be a two way street between an employee and an employer.

Employers expect employees to be on-call and handle production incidents quickly. That's good for the product.

The two way side of it is that employees must have the autonomy and time to fix the root causes of what's paging them to reduce toil.

This is the root of "you build it, you own it". "Own" means having autonomy.

That kind of engineering work does come at the expense of feature delivery. However, it's also good for the product.

Regarding getting paid more for going on-call, from your description, the issue doesn't sound like it's a financial one. If you received $X00 per week more, would that be an acceptable tradeoff for the constant anxiety of your phone paging you at any time or waking up at least once per night?

(source: am ex-PagerDuty and founded a company to help drive software ownership, so I've thought a lot about this)

[omosubi]

I'm always surprised people are willing to take money over time. I hate on call and would easily take a pay cut to never have to do it. I don't have kids or crazy expenses so I guess that's easy to say but an extra 2-3k a year is not worth spending a significant fraction of your life tethered to your phone/computer. to each his own I suppose

[t-writescode]

The truth of the matter is that if you’re working on a web service, you should be responsible for it, at the very least during its initial days of launch, you should be ‘on call’. Same with any time there’s changed you’ve made that are going live.

The “throw it over the wall and let the SREa handle it” pattern is overflowing with anti-patterns.

Now, if you’re making non-internet products, feel free to do it any other way; but, if you’re managing a website or web service, you should be available for it.

[omosubi]

Yeah I'm not saying that people shouldn't be responsible for the things they build just that there are a lot of people who will give up their time for usually some small amount of money (given what they make hourly) rather than to just take that time for what they want to. Where I work we have little leeway to fix issues and clients do dumb shit all the time and we have to deal with it. why would you give up your personal time for some marginal amount of money?

[t-writescode]

I've always expected on-call time to be part of my job. It's part of how I can be okay with working 4 hours one day and 10 hours the next day.

I'm salary and my compensation includes my on-call hours. That's how I've always seen it. Now, if there's a balance and if the work becomes excessive, then a conversation needs to be had and probably standards need to be looked at because something is very wrong at the company. On-call shouldn't regularly be demanding, almost everybody that's capable of it should be doing it in a given role, and so on.

When that's not true, it needs to be investigated because it's unsustainable.