I did on-call in the 90's. I wouldn't do it today on a regular basis, I need my sleep more than I need any job. I was a DBA back then. The author of the posts

I did on-call in the 90's. I wouldn't do it today on a regular basis, I need my sleep more than I need any job. I was a DBA back then. The author of the posts talks about calling for "back-up", back then they would page me (still just pagers then) and say the database was down. Most of the time the database wasn't down, and there was no real evidence the database was down, they were just calling for "back-up". I've worked at many jobs since then, including at startups, never did an on-call rotation at any of them since the DBA job. If it's important, you should probably have fully awake people scheduled to deal with it. To me that's different than supporting a release of code that you wrote. I mean if we really have to do this release at 9 PM and I'm the guy who wrote it, I'll probably show up, after I slept all day. But I'm no longer your database buddy that you commiserate with during the night when everything goes to shit since no one else will answer the pager.