On call should be optional and paid accordingly. It should not be a part of the job, because not everyone is fit to do it (physically, mentally, family-wise, or otherwise).
Incentivize people to take on-call time and those who are fit will take it.
I don’t think this is right: people who can’t do it shouldn’t be expected to, but software developers should support their application in production so that, if it’s hard to manage, they have an incentive to fix that problems: throwing code over the wall for an operations team to deal with is a clear case of externalizing negatives.
To some extent a good faith effort is in order, but someone who is perfectly capable of doing 99% of the job shouldn't be expected to respond to things at 3am unless they willingly do so for extra pay.
I for one am perfectly capable of advanced software engineering work but I am NOT capable of compromising my sleep without causing serious heart arrythmias. Some other person might have to deal with a baby. Some other person might sleep early and do meditation at that hour because it helps prevent panic attacks during the day. Everyone is different, and personal time and rest time should be respected. There is so much behind the curtain of off-work time that employers don't see, and don't need to see, they just need to respect that time.
In my experience this isn't a very good take, I've been woke up 50+ times in a 7 night span of on call, that fucking incentivized me to fix the issues. But that doesn't FUCK ALL to the product/sales people that actually direct where resources are spent. If the on call people ACTUALLY get to work on the on call issues, I think on call can work.
But in my experience, every single place I've worked, has had insane on call hours. And you were ALWAYS expected to do your normal work on top of the on call hours and you were NEVER given time to fix the issue that woke you up in the middle of the night.
Until the actually engineers/developers are in charge of their own schedules on call shifts will be fucking bullshit.
I think for some jobs it makes sense to have on-call as part of the job description, but it's heavily overused. If there isn't imminent danger I don't think it should be ever required to force someone to compromise rest.
If it's just a question of product uptime then you should have enough people and pay people extra to be on-call. And don't deploy things at 5pm on a Friday.
