I feel weirdly split on this. With my founder/leader hat on and thinking about my own on-call time, I think of myself as always on call. I also think it's my job to make it so that on-call incidents are very rare.

But when I think about arbitrary companies and people having regular jobs, I think that of course people should be compensated. It's labor and we pay people for that. And especially when it's more than just a few people, having on-call time and incidents be uncompensated means a broken feedback loop. The company should have strong incentives to make sure that on-call people don't suffer for the sloppiness of others.

Part of that is small vs big, or startup vs established. But there's some part of me that seems too reluctant to insist on proper compensation for my own on-call time. Clearly something I need to chew on before I next take a job at someplace larger than a few people.