I imagine that not being too unlike a small startup where only one or two or a few people are responsible for making sure the service works. In my case, I ran

I imagine that not being too unlike a small startup where only one or two or a few people are responsible for making sure the service works. In my case, I ran a startup for a few years which was quite profitable, but was set up in such a way that I often had to drop anything else I was doing and rush to respond to the service being down, at any time of day... In addition to already having more than enough to do between programming, sysadmin work and customer service. Being up adjusting to a change in a data providers JSON or figuring out why MySQL is cripplingly more slow all of a sudden at 3:30 am isn't a pleasant experience, especially if you also have to be up again at 9 am. In our case, there was little to do about it as the service provider we depended upon for almost everything frequently surprised us with breaking changes or temporary bugs. That led me to find the entire affair rather stressful. So, like everyone else is saying... Depends on how often you're paged, and whether you have any influence over the root cause of the errors you're being summoned to fix.