It seems that companies often end up with On-Call after they've reached some critical size but decide to do it in the cheapest possible way: let's just make our

It seems that companies often end up with On-Call after they've reached some critical size but decide to do it in the cheapest possible way: let's just make our engineers do it! One big problem is that they tend not to make any attempt to ensure that the on-call rotations are equitable across teams. You might need to be on call one week out of 4 or one week out of 20. At review time, this matters. Since you're typically not getting paid for the on call work or having it factor into your performance review, you're actually incentivized to snooze alerts and kick the can down the road until after your rotation or to join another team with lower rates of on call incidents. Ironically, if you're spending 25% or your time on call and actually being diligent about the role, you're more likely to be adept with the typically hodgepodge collection of tools that you need to use to diagnose and address problems and will be better able to handle incidents than if you only ever use those tools once every 5 months.