That sounds amazing until you get a system that is complicated and the part of the system you work on relies on an unstable dependency upon which you have no co

That sounds amazing until you get a system that is complicated and the part of the system you work on relies on an unstable dependency upon which you have no control. Oh no, my service isn't responding to 99.9% of requests within 250ms!? Boom, page at 2am. The service that is responsible for the alert either doesn't have monitoring set up correctly or at all or they aggregate their metrics differently, so on average, all of their calls are 5ms, but for all of your calls, maybe they're taking 2-3 seconds. It's a nightmare that I escaped after three years. I was driven from a happy person to someone who hated his life. It took me a while to realize it was my job. The worst part is my management told us that the on-call pay was already "baked into your salary." I switched jobs internally. No more on-call. Strangely, I was able to keep my pay without having to wake up in the middle of the night any more. Oh yeah, and you aren't the only one who wakes up. Someone sleeping in your bed may be an insomniac and may have just fallen asleep. Your alert wakes them. Now they don't get to sleep for the rest of the night. Now you and they are both sleep deprived and irritable. It obliterates personal relationships. Maybe your kids overhear you explaining to someone what is going on in the next room. Whenever anyone asks you about your job, PTSD triggers and you spend ten minutes venting. I am so, so, so glad I'm no longer on call. I don't know what they'd have to pay me to get back on it, but it's at least 2x, and even then, I couldn't last for over a year. You don't get to go to movies. You don't get to join your friends when they go biking or hiking or camping. You get interrupted in the middle of parent-teacher conference. You have a laptop next to you at the 4th of July party. You get interrupted in the middle of a shower. You don't get to host Thanksgiving or Christmas because you may have to work in the middle of making dinner. You're about the roll the dice to take the first turn of a game you've been promising your kids you'd play with them in the first attempt in a long time to be a decent parent, and your alarm goes off, you work for the next three hours, and they play without you. There is no 40-hour work week for software engineers. There is no union. You work your normal days then you also get to work normal nights. Then you work a normal day again either fixing the problem that caused the alert or spend 6 hours in post-mortems explaining what happened when instead you should be sleeping.