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Yeah, I also thought the on-call/pager thing was a little overblown. It immediately raised a red flag about how wet behind the ears OP is.

Not to say that there aren't toxic on-call rotations and such, only that it's a lot more common than you'd think, and is not limited to just doctors eyeroll

Any time a business unit needs to be accountable to another party after-hours, some sort of call schedule is created.

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> During the hiring process, on-call is not mentioned in any way other than the usual salaried catch-all "are you willing to work nights and/or weekends."

It should be very clear what the actual expectation is, though, instead of a nebulous "we may need you to work extra sometimes." It's a guarantee that you will work extra at a fixed interval, and that extra work happens to be psychologically draining.

I ask for quite the premium in salary if I know I'm going to be on call.

I found that weird. On-call is so central to the technical identity of Amazon that I'm surprised you could get through the hiring process without knowing that you'd be on-call.

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