[hx8]

I'd take a night-shift job over being on call ontop of a 9-5.

I think the real answer here is to have team members on multiple continents. Have some team members NA/EU/Asia then it's always reasonable hours for someone to deal with the production problem. High priority issues can be worked on around the clock without anyone working overtime.

[lolinder]

That's still shift work. It's still the company assuming that I'll be available during N specific hours of the workday in order to fix issues.

Look at it this way:

If I work a job where I'm expected to be on 9-5, 46 weeks per year, 40 hours each week, that amounts to 1840 hours of scheduling my life around my employer.

If I work a job where I can schedule my work however I like and also have on call 1 week out of every quarter, the worst case scenario there is 672 hours of scheduling my life around my employer (and in practice the demands of on call in my current rotation are far less than that). The rest of my life I can schedule as I please, so long as I do my job.

I would rather take the option that minimizes the number of hours where my employer gets to tell me where to be.

[fsckboy]

I know plenty of friends (mostly medical) who've had "on call" shifts on top of their 9 to 5, but in those cases it was pretty exceptional for them to actually receive a call, and the "interruptions" would be a small number of hours.