I really hate on-call, sadly in any serious distributed systems used by many customers/running large scale online services on-call is table stakes :| It's not

I really hate on-call, sadly in any serious distributed systems used by many customers/running large scale online services on-call is table stakes :| It's not like SWEs are paid by hour. If you are on call for a week every 2-3 months (for example), you could just consider the extra 2 work weeks (assuming 8 hour days for a normal week) of part-time work to be part of your paycheck. Staffing competent people 24x7 is completely impractical in a sufficiently complex system... what you can have, and I have experienced, is some clueless 24x7 first-tier support. These guys don't work on the product so they usually cannot solve any problem that is not completely basic. And if they can't solve a problem, they'd call a component owner (or a random person) at any time, which is worse than someone being on-call. If you have a rotation, you can safely disappear when you are not on, because there's someone competent responsible for dealing with live site.