If your on-call responsibilities are always “fixing bugs or restarting servers”, then indeed you built it poorly. But on-call shifts can also be used for respon

If your on-call responsibilities are always “fixing bugs or restarting servers”, then indeed you built it poorly. But on-call shifts can also be used for responding to novel situations that couldn’t be planned for in advance. The best on-call rotations are the ones where you’re rarely paged, but when those pages happen they’re for important urgent work where your involvement is vital (even if your role only needs to be channeling the work to the right person). Ideally you’re also compensated for being available, even when nothing happens (my current team gets a day off [in addition to normal PTO] for every week of on-call time).