Because, you undervalue your time, you open yourself for abuse. May be that project that is behind can be done by you after work, as you sometimes do work then anyways. I have seen some managers who are acutely sensitive to this and repeatedly use this to their advantage while charming the underlings. Next, being on call means it is difficult to plan that long vacation, or a unplanned night of shit faced drinking with your buddies, or unable to sit with your kid in the night when she is sick. A perspective of life as unpredictable events helps reinforce this idea. You are, with out compensation making life predictable for others while making it less predictable to you. Third, your mental and physical health. Sleep disorders because of restlessness, groggy mornings and the stress that comes with normal working hours will take a toll over long term.
Let's do the laziest back of the napkin math. Let's pretend you make $100k and work 2000 hours a year. You make $50/hr. Let's say you do 50 hours of week between trying to impress your boss and getting woken up to do call. Congratulations, you are now a $40/hr employee!
Also, in my experience, the people who aren't getting woken up at 3am (aka. your boss) don't value the time and effort needed to stabilize these systems. So they want you working on the new shiny product feature that will get them promoted. Fixing the crappy data pipeline that shouldn't alert every other night isn't a priority when you aren't the one being woken up.
Well, it should be a priority, but I also don't work at that previous job for this exact reason. I took a nice pay increase and have never had to be on-call. Don't settle.
EDIT: Original 2000 hours comes from 40 hours a week * 50 weeks. Like I said, back of the napkin math here.
> Also, in my experience, the people who aren't getting woken up at 3am (aka. your boss) don't value the time and effort needed to stabilize these systems.
There's the rub. The issue isn't being on-call, it's not prioritizing making sure the system is robust so that on-call is boring.
In my last job there was no formal on-call, but if shit was going bad I'd be expected to resolve it, or track down the right resources to do so. In my current there is a formal on-call rotation. In my 15 years at the previous job I probably got called out of bed 3-4 times (and due to my roll I was the first call, if anyone got woken up, I did, and then had to wake anyone else needed). In my 7 months in the new job it hasn't happened yet.
When everything is on fire, it feels obvious to me that asking your $x00k employee to put it out isn't unreasonable. What is unreasonable is making that the plan instead of having robust fire-prevention systems and making that the exception.
Another way of thinking about this is that you've invested 10 dollars of your paycheck into your career. I worked way more than 50 hours a week when I started my career. Subsequently, I was able to drop out of school early (by 2 years, saving 10s of thousands of dollars), get a full time job, increase my compensation by 50% within 2 years, and then by 200% the following year when I changed companies.
By your math I'm sure I was getting paid 1/3rd of my actual compensation. But that has more than paid off in terms of the investment.
You're making the assumption that being on-call made some kind of difference to your career progression--as other commenters have noted, no one is doing good or interesting work during on call hours. You're just the company bitch and you get to do bitch work. Other industries require hazing like this too: finance comes to mind. But not every software firm requires on-call; you just picked the wrong company and allowed yourself to get screwed.
As a manager, yes it did. Managers are simple people. All they do most of the time is try to figure out who is critical and who is expendable (invest or tolerate). While it's not the only path to the invest bucket, putting out a fire in the middle of the night is a quick way to land there. It's often a good way to prove yourself in early career scenarios when you don't have a ton of architectural pull power.
> You're making the assumption that being on-call made some kind of difference to your career progression
Two things.
1) I didn't just put in on-call overtime. I put in "free" hours in general.
2) I'm not really making a big assumption. Unsurprisingly working a lot of hours gave a very positive impression of me and I was able to easily justify raises and promotions when I asked.
Calling on-call hazing or bitch work is stupid, I'm not engaging with this.
I was on a team that had lost a lot of it's members. We worked hard to keep up and were on track to meet deadlines. Some time went by, we were working nights and weekends and every time we asked we were assured that they were hiring but "couldn't find the right person". At the same time, every week we would hear about a new hire in management. They were magically able to find some new hires as soon as deadlines started to slip, had we not worked those nights and weekends I am certain that they would've found someone to hire much earlier (the first guy they did hire said the process took three months, they were clearly dragging their feet). Too bad I learned that lesson after already spending the day of my daughters birth in long meetings about testing environments.
Why would they pay for something they can get for free?