There is a cost to having on-call. Whether it's in the extra hours you are paying your engineers or other technicians, or sleep deprivation, dwindling motivation and performance, the cost is always there.
In a business, cost is always balanced with the return on that investment.
So it trivially follows that on-call only makes sense where the return is bigger than the investment. If you are having your $100/h engineers become $20/h engineers during the day because of the on-call rotation, and you lose $200 of sales over night when things are down (even your customers are asleep) — you are actually investing that $80/h difference for 8 hours ($640) to recover $200, for a net loss of $440.
Yes, there are cases where it's fully acceptable to simply have your service down for the night. Eg. imagine a service that provides the amount of energy sun is providing for a location (to combine it with solar farm production): is it really that bad if that's down at 2am? Sure, it might be nice to get it back up before the sun is up, but this is just a trivial example where an uptime of ~70% (fluctuates) is perfectly acceptable.
> There is a cost to having on-call. Whether it's in the extra hours you are paying your engineers or other technicians, or sleep deprivation, dwindling motivation and performance, the cost is always there.
I don't understand your take. Every single time I had a job with an oncall rotation, that oncall was paid. I was paid a bonus for being oncall, I was paid a bonus if during oncalls a pager fired outside of office hours, I was paid a bonus if I was pulled into an incident response outside of my oncall rotation. There was always a cost, and we were paid for it. Being oncall represented loosely a pay bump of around 15%.
If that's not your case then I'm sorry but your problem is not the oncall rotation.
That should make my point more obvious: why would a business pay you 15% more if they are losing minor or no money or customers if services are down until someone comes back for their regular work day?
There is a cost to having on-call. Whether it's in the extra hours you are paying your engineers or other technicians, or sleep deprivation, dwindling motivation and performance, the cost is always there.
In a business, cost is always balanced with the return on that investment.
So it trivially follows that on-call only makes sense where the return is bigger than the investment. If you are having your $100/h engineers become $20/h engineers during the day because of the on-call rotation, and you lose $200 of sales over night when things are down (even your customers are asleep) — you are actually investing that $80/h difference for 8 hours ($640) to recover $200, for a net loss of $440.
Yes, there are cases where it's fully acceptable to simply have your service down for the night. Eg. imagine a service that provides the amount of energy sun is providing for a location (to combine it with solar farm production): is it really that bad if that's down at 2am? Sure, it might be nice to get it back up before the sun is up, but this is just a trivial example where an uptime of ~70% (fluctuates) is perfectly acceptable.