> I truly don't get what kind of company is expecting software engineers to be on call.
What if you have clients who pay you big $$$ and they work all the time? That's not that unusual.
> What do they even want you to do about issues clients have with software? If the software is down for some reason, call devops. Or call AWS. I don't care.
Very narrow view. You can have a software team of 4 people and bring in 10-100 mil contracts. There's not a DevOps staff in this case. And what would AWS do?
> If there's a bug, its not going to get fixed at 4am by one person pushing a hotfix through production.
I've solved 100s of problems ~4am by doing just this.
> Although if thats how bugs get fixed at your company, maybe you should revisit whether thats a good approach to devops and when you find that its bs
- Buy/start to manage legacy app for XYZ company
- Legacy app breaks
- Need to fix it
None of that has anything to do with the software company being a bad company. Things break.
> "btw, you're on-call.." "if I wanted to be on call, I'd be in medicine."
I'd be super mad if I didn't know I needed to be on call at a company and they just told me I needed to be.
I'm not arguing that it should be expected in software, just that there are plenty of software companies that require on-call staff, like mine.