[hylaride]

I've worked at places where I was the only person on-call (except during vacations - that's horseshit).

It was fine, but as an SRE/DevOps person I had the authority to override the developer backlogs to get issues fixed and enforce monitoring, architectural, and quality standards. Technical debt rarely built up and we could take one step back before taking two forwards. The product people hate me at first, but the result was usually a platform where problems only ever occurred during deployments (which I've been mostly lucky that I was at places we could do it during business hours) or external factors happened (cloud resource issues, etc).

At my current company, I can count on one hand how many times I've been paged out of business hours in the last 4 years (we recently re-did oncall because it was recognized that it was a risk that I'd become irreplaceable, which is the one point I tried to hammer on them for awhile).

The worst on-call experience I ever had was working at a managed services company. That was the hell of supporting customers that refused to properly allocate resources or invest in their tech stacks. Never again.