That's clearly not a sustainable answer for the world - professions ranging from doctors to priests to soldier to sailor to CEO (can't ignore a crisis if it happens on Saturday morning) to lawmaker all require working the occasional unscheduled hour. And that's not even counting jobs like pilot or convenience store clerk or paramedic that require at least some people to work on what the world considers holidays (even if it's scheduled as part of their 40 hours a week).
Is there a meaning of "work-life separation" that encompasses these professions too, or shall we say the world relies on some people not having it?
Otherwise, companies need to hire night shifts if they want someone covering while the devs are asleep. If you want full uptime, then hire for it! Your employees shouldn't give up their sleep and weekends for a measly 0.003% of your company.
Also, I would strongly support extra pay for low-wage workers working holidays, weekends, or night shifts.
It's pretty naive to think you can just hire random people to step in and support complex business systems part-time.
Sure, you can have a global ops team that can deal with basic system issues like "this machine ran out of disk space", but not "we're seeing a spike in 500s in our payment system because something that got deployed earlier today broke a workflow". And saying "well just roll back!" isn't a solution either. Maybe you can't roll back. Maybe that won't fix it because data is now corrupt. Maybe it wasn't even a deploy to that system that broke things, but some feature flag in some distant system. No one except the team itself can diagnose these issues appropriately.
Working N hours in unusual schedule is different from working N hours in usual schedule and then being on call.
With the former, you get some compensation, for example you may work on Saturday but have a free Monday. Depending on your priorities, it may actually be a good deal -- there are things you can do more conveniently when you have a free Monday.
With the latter, it's "when you're at work, you're at work, and when you're at home, there is still a tiny voice in your head remininding you that your boss could call you at literally any moment". This may limit the ways you spend your free time, for example you can't go to places where it would be impossible or very inconvenient to get quickly online when called. And generally, you just can't make promises even about how you spend your free time.
For a sufficiently large company, it should be possible to find a few people willing to take an unusual schedule, and then the company could be covered 24/7, with every employee able to turn off their work phone the moment they leave. It's just... more convenient for the managers to do it the other way round.
> or shall we say the world relies on some people not having [...]?
It does rely on that. Supply and demand works that way. Eventually the offered price is enough to change some minds. I'll change mine at about $3k/hour-on-call.
Sounds like you’re being a facetious but there are plenty of companies that do pay you if you do end up getting paged. Not for being scheduled on call. Plenty of companies also do 12 hour shifts during the day if you’re on call and have SREs handle the rest for the most part.
There are companies that compensate you for all on call hours.
Being paid only if you are paged is not appropriate compensation for interrupting your personal life: having your laptop, reliable internet, cellular coverage, being available on x minutes notice.
I'm at the complete opposite of the spectrum there, on-call 24/7/365.
Then again partially own the company and enjoy my colleagues. If I go dark for a few days answering non-urgent queries no one questions it because they know I wake up at 3am and put out digital fires within short timeframes.
Life and balance are just words in the end, you can clock off at exactly 5pm to the nanosecond and still not find that holy grail ever. It is what you make it.
Seems unreasonable to say never. Like what a sibling commenter said, it seems like you’ll miss out on potential earnings in your career by being this inflexible.
