[joshuamorton]

This is "companies do on-call badly".

For the purposes of this exercise presume that our theoretical on-call process is no worse than Google's SRE structure: You are on-call for a 12 hour shift that is more or less aligned with your waking hours, and you are compensated extra for the time you are on-call outside of normal working hours, whether or not you are called in. You are on-call at most one week per month, on average, and usually less.

[tharkun__]

    You are on-call for a 12 hour shift that is more or less aligned with your waking hours

I suppose if you're Google they can theoretically make it so it's more aligned with your waking hours? Do they do it? Most companies don't or can't. I.e. it's _less_ aligned.

    you are compensated extra for the time you are on-call outside of normal working hours, whether or not you are called in

How much? Way too many on-call processes in which this is nothing but a few dollars to be able to say "see, we do pay for this, even when you're not called!". As in, way not enough for the number being on-call does to how you go about your day. Always on edge, always awaiting that call / alert that requires you to drop whatever you are currently doing. Preventing you from actually doing/starting certain things.

You haven't even mentioned the expected reaction and resolution time and that alone can make a huge difference.

    You are on-call at most one week per month, on average, and usually less.

Great, only one week out of four /s That's crazy if you ask me. Going back to preventing you from going about your day in a normal way. There's no "doing on-call well" in how you describe it.

[ksmith14]

Google staffs SRE teams as either 8 in one location/TZ or two geographically distributed teams of 6 -- often some pairwise combination of U.S., Europe, and Australia to accommodate reasonable on-call shifts.

The on-call compensation varies depending on what tier of service they're offering. Tier 1 (5 minute response time) is 2/3 of your effectively hourly pay for on-call time outside of local business hours and 1/3 for tier 2 (30 min response time). Or time off in lieu.

[joshuamorton]

Note that this is at a minimum, I know some teams with 10-12 folks per location. That just also has downsides since you can end up oncall once a quarter which most people in the role don't like since the extra vacation is nice.