Working in backbone operations for a mid sized ISP, we sure don't have 1:30 meetings, but we do have scheduled 1:30 maintenance events (planned several weeks in advance), and people on the on-call list are expected to be available for middle of the night emergencies. Catastrophic fiber cuts and equipment failures like a roof failing and pouring water onto a DWDM chassis have the tendency to occur at fun times like 0330 in the morning on a holiday.
It is expected and known that if you do something like respond to a 0130 in the morning emergency and work the issue until 0430, then go to sleep, that you're going to sleep until whenever you wake up in the mid afternoon and probably not be useful for any other tasks that day.
I should point out that the salaried employees expected to respond to such things are compensated appropriately, and the general practice is to have a group of people so that each person is only on-call for some portion of each month.
The rank and file NOC employees and fiber splicers, field crews, field technicians are hourly employees and get overtime for incidents as described above. Depending on the state and labor laws they're also paid an hourly rate simply for being on-call, even if nothing happens, for the duration of their on-call rotation week(s).
Everything you said sounds reasonable. Tasks and hours are related to the specific work at hand, and mitigations are then given, as temporary allowances, to employees if extra work is demanded that are outside of "core hours"
I was just trying to highlight that I personally hate "core hours" and that if I'm on a marathon coding session from 9pm to 4am, and I'm intermittently unavailable from some arbitrary time (say 11:15am to 11:50am) and then I get a bunch of messages from bosses saying "where were you??" and I then explain that I was actually writing code, point to some commits and say "see? I did all this stuff" and they say "you are expected to work from 9am to 6pm" it feels like a slap in the face. I think good management should accept that people aren't robots (unless there is an outage, fair enough) and consider people's working preferences in their decisions.
Anyways, I'm sure you have some awesome war stories with deployments/maintenance events. You should share them sometime :D
There are definitely good reasons to, at minimum, have you _available_ from 9-6; say, for a meeting or to bring a coworker up to speed on what you're working on, but at the same time you don't necessarily need to be pinned to your desktop for the entire period of time to do that. Since remote working started I've taken advantage of that big time by just running errands during the work day but keeping my phone close by in case I get a ping on Slack.
It is expected and known that if you do something like respond to a 0130 in the morning emergency and work the issue until 0430, then go to sleep, that you're going to sleep until whenever you wake up in the mid afternoon and probably not be useful for any other tasks that day.
I should point out that the salaried employees expected to respond to such things are compensated appropriately, and the general practice is to have a group of people so that each person is only on-call for some portion of each month.
The rank and file NOC employees and fiber splicers, field crews, field technicians are hourly employees and get overtime for incidents as described above. Depending on the state and labor laws they're also paid an hourly rate simply for being on-call, even if nothing happens, for the duration of their on-call rotation week(s).