Having worked for a few places with on-call clauses in contracts, I'm inclined to say yes. There are companies that handle on-call work really well. They'll pa

Having worked for a few places with on-call clauses in contracts, I'm inclined to say yes. There are companies that handle on-call work really well. They'll pay a person over their usual hour rate for nights on-call, and they will reimburse them with time spent, so that if you are forced awake in the morning, you get that time off from normal hours. Good companies also allow employees to opt-out, because typically a call from the on-call phone is waking up more than one person in a family - it's this reason why I no longer choose to do on-call work. In my experience, there are a lot of companies that abuse on-call work, especially in agencies. In the last five years, I've seen: * Contracts where a person is only paid for being on-call if something goes wrong * Verbal contracts where people have been asked to go on-call for below minimum wage - £10 a call, regardless of time spent. * Tracking set up against alerts and how long it has taken the developer to react to said alert, with employees being punished for not being online within minutes. * Developers being lumped with unsociable rotas - one dev I used to work with was a bit of a doormat, and he signed up to Friday, Saturday, and Sunday on-call. He eventually did every day on call because every developers dropped out. * On-call work paid for with gift vouchers (i.e. if you're buzzed and you fix the issue, I'll give you a £20 Tesco gift voucher). * Delayed alarms set up to wake up managers if a developer hasn't reported a fix within a given time. It sounds okay, because a lot of the time the manager can help, but it was used as a way to punish developers for not fixing things quick enough. * Developers punished for being tired/ill, after working all night on call supporting a project, and then being told to come in to work for a day of meetings. These have happened at companies I've worked at, and at companies my friends have worked at. These aren't small companies either. Some of these are at large companies/agencies, many of which you may have heard of. As a concept, it's a critical business need that needs to be addressed, but without considered protection I'm inclined to see it as an opportunity to poke for red flags, rather than a sign of business being done right.