Amazon on-call engineer here! I'm on-call for three rotations. Two are "Call leader" rotations where a call leader like me is engaged if there's any kind of lar

Amazon on-call engineer here! I'm on-call for three rotations. Two are "Call leader" rotations where a call leader like me is engaged if there's any kind of large event (e.g. Amazon.com orders aren't working, or an AWS service is having issues). I volunteer for those because it's super rewarding to be able to help materially make a tangible difference now and then, wouldn't trade them away for anything. For those rotations, I am paged in the middle of the night, and there's nothing I can really do about that. The other rotation is for one of my dev-team's software, and I'm hardly ever paged - like once or twice a year max. That's how it's supposed to be: by having skin in the game and being directly on the hook for the reliability of what we produce, I'm sure that we automate to a much greater degree than we might otherwise. We have a culture of strong ownership: it's not uncommon to see senior engineers elect to be engaged on all of their team's live issues, even if they aren't on-call themselves. Some other teams make different trade-offs, and have follow-the-sun rotations or engagements that are more reliant on humans following run-books than automations. There can be a place for that, but it gets old quickly and is not scalable. Good teams will prioritize the work to get out of that above almost anything.