I used to be on-call during one of my first jobs. We would get called all the time, and a lot of time these were simple issues like reboot or restart a process. But it cut into our personal time. And we didn't get any compensation for it.

Team wanted to do root cause analysis and fix problems for good but there was always some new very important feature to build. So we never fixed these issues.

The way our on-call escalation worked was something like this: First, on-call gets the call. If the issue is not resolved in 15 minutes, then it is escalated to teamlead. After another 15 or 30 minutes, it is escalated to manager and then entire team. After an hour it is escalated to manager's manager. Other teams/SMEs had to join on-call bridge. Then director, VPs etc. And supposedly if it takes long enough it would escalate all the way to CEO.

I used to feel really guilty if it escalated past my teamlead. And if my manager joined the bridge, she would really scare us about further escalation and make us take all kind of shortcuts like hard reboot servers. She never cared for us to find root cause.

But every once in a while issues will get escalated past her to her boss. And then those issues would become top priority to fix for good.

Soon entire team/department learned this. So we stopped fixing issues as soon as possible. We would pretend like server is stuck, internet connection issues, etc. Wait for call to escalate as high as possible. Some of the teammates would even join online games while supposedly troubleshooting.

Eventually stabilizing our code and environment became top priority instead adding new features. We spent a few months squashing all kind of bugs, added processes like code reviews, unit tests, etc. And after those few months of hard work, our off-hours calls dropped by 90%.

And this is when I learned leadership won't care about our life if they are not impacted by their policies.

Now at my current company I do have on-call but I don't change anything for it. If I am out having dinner with my wife, and I get a work call, I acknowledge it but let my manager know that I will look at the issue in couple of hours. They can get someone else to look at it or wait a few hours. (Also by fighting for quality, we rarely ever get calls after work and management understand why I would spend time with my family during on-call week.)

Yeah, 100% agree with you. It takes away a lot of enjoyability from your free time. And it also simply eliminates a lot of activities, like playing pretty much any team sport.

In my case, I like playing basketball, and I can't go to a friendly game with friends when I'm on-call, unless there's more people to rotate for the game(so if I have to leave it's not that big of a deal for the rest)

I didn't mean that being on-call it's great, far from it. I just think it's a reasonable way to compensate the employee.

It sucks to be on-call, but someone has to be. The right people have to be notified of the right alerts and not just notify everyone affected. Also, if it's been a night call, they usually allow the employee to come in late.

I think we as a collective have "dropped the ball". Doctors do "on call" on premise, getting paid every hour, or have ample wait times. We don't have any of those