[mrkeen]

Engineers don't pick their work, management does.

A manager no longer needs to choose between system reliability and churning out new features with on-call:

The manager can get all the credit for pushing out new features during the day, and sleep well at night knowing that the engineers aren't.

[procaryote]

At a lot of companies engineers are involved in picking the work. It's silly to hire competent problem solvers and treat them as unskilled workers needing micro-management.

Besides, if you set the on-call system up so people get free time the following day to compensate for waking up at night, the manager can't pretend there's no cost.

Bad management will fail on both of these of course, but there's no saving that beyond finding a better company.

[whstl]

It is silly indeed but unfortunately this is what happens in companies that don’t have a good engineering culture.