[PeterisP]

They definitely get involved when there's a meaningful impact on the company operations. Every business continuity plan involves top management; I've personally seen it in mid-size companies, and for the really big megacorps, just recently I was looking at a case study on the Maersk (#297 in fortune 500) management response to a cyberattack and it pretty much starts with the chairman being woken up at 4am local time. (e.g. source at https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/maersk-reinst... )

"presumably there can be some sort of crisis [...] but that's not exactly the same thing." - I'd say that it's exactly the same thing; on-call engineers are (or should be) just on an escalation path for crisis/emergency events; top managers are higher up in the escalation chain (if it's not a routine thing that others can easily resolve) but they're on escalation chain for every aspect of a large company. Of course, those events need to be rare - for example, as the original article states, up to 2-3 actual calls per year for a person being on-call; we should probably make a serious distinction between "on-call for emergencies" (which should be rare) and "routine out-of-hours support" (which might get triggered every week or even more frequently, obviously not an extraordinary event but a standard business process), which is something quite different and should have different solutions than emergency escalation.