[aero142]

I've been part of an on call rotation at my current job and previous job. Both had the same rules because I and other engineers insisted on it.

* You are only on-call for systems you can directly change.

* The person who is on call has full flexibility to work on anything that improves the life of the on-call person for that time.

* Anything that wakes people up in the middle of the night gets prioritized above new feature work.

* There is a pager set of monitors, and a message only set of monitors. If a page goes off, and there is nothing the on-call engineer can do about it, it gets moved to the message only channel or removed, because it is a bad monitor.

I discussed this list of rules when I interviewed and the job description included being on-call. It wasn't a negotiation. If those aren't followed, I remove the monitors. I'm sorry you had a terrible work environment, but I encourage everyone to have professional standards. I hope you find a place where you can.