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I'm confused. What's your plan for fixing Gmail on a Saturday night? Hope one of the devs doesn't have a social life?

Google is big enough to have teams around the world, all in their own daytime zone.

It's still the weekend wherever you are if it's Saturday in North America

If you have teams in Israel, you at least can cheat a bit on Sunday v.s Friday.

And having at least one daytime rotation agree that "well, you're expected to be on-call during business hours on Saturday" isn't nearly as crazy as "you can't relax at any time during the weekend".

Or just, like... allow people to have a Sun/Mon weekend (or Mon/Tue, or whatever) instead of Sat/Sun.

There are plenty of people who would be happy with that and plenty more who would accept that arrangement if it came with extra compensation.

Instead, particularly at big companies, people get hired with some generic comp. package and then it's luck of the draw whether you have an on-call rotation or not, and if you do whether it's onerous or not.

Employees and employers should be able to negotiate alternative weekends in that case. These alternate days are dealt with like real weekends with the real force of law and societal expectations.

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