[vidarh]

The option is to compensate for it on top of extra salary to the point where you get enough volunteers for rotation, and/or hire for it.

I had a side gig that very explicitly was being hired to be the guy that gets woken up by PagerDuty. They paid me about an extra $1k/month purely for having my phone on in addition to what they paid me for the time I spent dealing with actual issues. Even then $1k/month was only enough because most of the other work I did for them was explicitly to improve site availability so I could ensure the platform was resilient enough that I rarely got woken up. In effect my hourly rate for being woken up probably translated to $2k-$3k/hour, with it sometimes going half a year between being woken up, before suddenly a bad release might cost me sleep a few nights in a row.

But having felt the stress of this on a full-time basis in the past, without that kind of compensation, I don't think it's cost-effective to have your dev team serve this role vs. having a few people on retainer to at least triage and try the obvious things. You're going to pay for it with staff that do not get proper rest (even when the phone doesn't go off it'll be there at the back of your head).