If they can’t afford to staff for 24x7 operation and maintain profitability that’s their problem. They should either reduce their service hours or charge more.
By working for free you’re subsidizing your organization’s unsustainable business model.
By working for free you’re subsidizing your organization’s unsustainable business model.
Don’t like it, quit and find a company that is moving slowly and doesn’t value ownership from engineers, someone else will fill in the vacant post. Sounds like a reasonably sustainable business model to me, especially since it has worked like this for over decades at some companies.
This has totally not been this way for decades.
Now if you're a founder, or you're being paid for this extra work or own a significant part of the business and benefit from it's success, that's a little bit different.
The lawyers at my company go home at 5 and make way more. I know a doctor who gets paid somewhere around $1500 for every day he is on call. And when they actually call him he makes even more.
Of course, you can still go to law school if you're really that jealous.
That said, there is a level of seniority at which "their problem" is "your problem." If you'd chuck the business out the door rather than getting paged a few times a year, you're not ready for that level yet. This varies by company and organization size, but fundamentally you can't (and shouldn't try to) anticipate everything up front. Sometimes you need the knowledge, judgement, or simply signing authority (literal or metaphorical) of someone specific.
I’ve long decided that unless I have the significant stock options to show for it it’s delusional. It’s what the company wants you to think: to have all the emotional investment and none of the actual ownership benefits.