Compared to the article, many on-call situations could suck even more. In a past assignment, I was on-call for a service managing thousands of customer instanc

Compared to the article, many on-call situations could suck even more. In a past assignment, I was on-call for a service managing thousands of customer instances each with a different version of an highly customizable application (basically an SDK) developed by another team. The result was on-call being basically a working day, getting paged on average every hour and at worst needing to track 2 or 3 war rooms in parallel. Also you felt powerless because while being accountable for the availability of the service, a lot of the issues actually came from customer implementations overloading their instance or product bugs which would get ignored for years and if a fix was done it would take even more years to be deployed due to the difficulties in updating the application. The only saving graces were: * It was in a large international org, so it was "follow the Sun", no midnight calls, only 8 hours shifts (11:00 to 19:00) * I live in a country were it's a legal requirement to compensate employees for being on-call Now, I've switched to a team were we handle on-call on services we control end to end (code and deployment), and it has been far less stressful.