[0xFACEFEED]

> not liking the consequences of choosing those options

Correct. "Shove it" is usually preceded by not liking something.

> They could negotiate with their manager to lessen the load.

Most of the time the manager will simply refuse. As a business owner it's my decision.

> They could upgrade the systems.

At big companies this is usually outside the scope of an on-call engineer. The on-call engineer often doesn't even have commit rights to that repository.

The specific example I gave was paying $10/month more. That can be a very hard sell at a large company because their service contracts are much more complicated/expensive.

> They could straight-up refuse on call.

A business owner has much more negotiating power than an employee does.

> They don't because they don't like the consequences of taking these options—and neither does the self-employed person!

In the vast majority of cases making changes to the on-call infrastructure has very little (if any) measurable impact on the business. Like spending a week making the systems better. Or changing deploy/release dates to be more convenient.

As a business owner I can take advantage of this and make my life easier.

As an employee I have layers of bureaucracy to wade through and will probably be refused. Not because it affects the business but for other reasons.

That's the difference.