Well, that someone better be someone else than me, because I'm not going to do unpaid night shifts. If you want something running 24/7, it's surely important enough to warrant hiring someone else to take care of it while I'm asleep, no?
Keep your fancy valley salary (with the ridiculous rent prices attached), and I'll keep my European workers right's protection—including undisturbed sleep after my 8 hours workday.
Yeah, it's different in the EU. In the US, it's often expected from engineers to be on unpaid oncall—that is, these companies usually phrase being oncall as part of your ordinary duties, without additional compensation. And even if it's compensated, sometimes you cannot opt out of this without seriously harming your career.
Something ridiculous like that is luckily impossible in (most?) EU countries.
At one company, I was technically on call 24 hours a day 7 days a week for over ten years. Did I get called that often? No. Did I get called at the worst possible moments? Yes.
That's not a problem with the concept of being oncall. That's an entirely different problem that's not technical nor operational not industry-specific.
Isn’t the fact that you receive calls seldomly, but at the worst possible moment literally the core problem of being oncall?
And it’s certainly industry-specific. Some doctors have this, firefighters—and software engineers. Contrary to the first two, they usually don’t save lives, but revenue though.
Keep your fancy valley salary (with the ridiculous rent prices attached), and I'll keep my European workers right's protection—including undisturbed sleep after my 8 hours workday.