[steelegbr]

I was on-call for over a decade, usually in roles where there was no compensation for working out of hours other than maybe TOIL. We're not talking FAANG gigs here - like £20-50k in the UK stuff. It's amazing how much having to carry an extra phone or making sure your laptop is in your car impacts your day-to-day life. Any social thing you're at could be interrupted at zero notice. Heck, I've taken calls in supermarkets and concert venues.

One place I worked had a 1 in 2 rotation. Every other week on call or weeks back to back if your colleague was on holiday. There was no front-line service screening calls which meant you could be woken several times in one night. All for £30 pcm towards broadband costs.

Most places are more sane than that example but suffer from the same core problem. Follow the sun support is incredibly expensive when compared to putting your existing staff to be on call. Here in the UK, so long as your equivalent hourly rate doesn't drop below national minimum wage and you're opted out of the working time directive (a lot of employers slip an opt-out form into your paperwork implying it's normal to sign it), then it's legal.

Unfortunately I'm yet to find anywhere that on-call operational teams have the clout to get code induced issues high up the priority list outside of cases where they've had to drag developers out of bed at 2am. In my experience that also plays out with getting anything infrastructure based into tech debt budgets. Why focus on fixing problems you don't directly suffer from when you can spend the time on a refactor, integrating a cool new library or spaffing out one more feature in the sprint?