There is always a tension between delivering features and delivering quality, but that's no excuse for constant fire drills and notifications. It's possible to handle the tradeoff better than that.
As a result, we really should force employers to treat us better rather than viewing us as replaceable. They also need to learn that their way shouldn't be the only way.
We've never had greater labor mobility, remote options or demand for software developers; I question your premise of limited number of companies.
Not only are her colleagues and managers extremely mean and unprofessional to her, the hospital executives are actively training the non-union nurses to replace the union respiratory therapists, because "cost".
(And also not subject basic rights like healthcare to market forces, but that’s a bridge a little farther.)
I've been considering my options lately and the more I think about it, the more I hear "contracting" as one of the better ways to make liveable money without losing control over your working conditions + dialogue with client(s).
When you have constant, daily interaction with middle managers who are trying to become VPs or whatever, it can be extremely grating. Workplace politics, policies, and appearances are all created by these people so that they can protect their jobs and future bonuses.
So, perhaps consulting + contracting will create a barrier between you and the middle managers. They're forced to work with you more collaboratively because the CEO signs the checks on this one (hopefully), not the individual department you work for.
But yeah, out of the thousands of corporations and startups of all ages, industries, and sizes, I bet only 10% or less have an efficient, enjoyable, and equitable experience between low-ranking employees and their layers of management.
That's what is causing all the job-hopping and attempts to "trade-up" ;)
Even if you're happy where you are, if you started more than 5 years ago, you'd be shocked to hear what kinds of salaries are on offer now if you're willing to switch companies. That's a sign that companies view developers as scarce resources rather than replaceable commodities.
I write software only though, I’m not doing DevOps. DevOps probably handles the fires.
What you're describing is a legacy, traditional, (and terrible!) 'ops will fix it' mentality that often permeates larger companies where dev teams 'throw stuff over the wall' to another team for production deployments, outage triage, etc
A company with a devops culture deeply involves both developers and operations oriented folks from the start of a project to ensure best practices, reliability, and observability are being baked in from the start, that deployments are automated, and usually developers are more directly responsible for and involved in the operations of their software rather than having dedicated 'ops' teams doing 'firefighting'
Read some of the content put out by Gene Kim or Martin Fowler for a much more in depth look at devops culture and the benefits it can bring a company.
If it’s possible for a minor change to go into production within 24 hours, everything needs to be this fast. http://www.cc.com/video-clips/1myllo/the-miracle-of-flight
If you're in the habit of doing 24 hour turnarounds, then a 24 hour turnaround is no longer an "emergency", it's just normal process. No reason to panic, or to act panicked. Emergencies are only emergencies if they interrupt work-in-progress.
The problem is when you discover something to work on and want it released in 24 hours then you are throwing away any existing schedule as you can’t plan for what you don’t know about.
Call it an emergency or just day to day operations, but the only way to work like that is to give up on the idea of a schedule of any kind.