Here's my answer to on-call requests: no. And if you ask me to clarify my statement, I will answer: no. Because no is good enough, and it's what I negotiated when I took the job.

I don't work for employers who can't manage their staff properly. If you're on-call at a company with any sort of scale, you aren't being managed properly. One of the things I tell hiring managers is that I don't mind working later if we're reaching the end of a project and a late afternoon or two might get the product pushed out of the door sooner, or if I've gotten into the zone and am making reat progress. But these are my choices to make. There will never ever be a time when I will subject myself to being tied to a phone for the purposes of waking up in the middle of the night and messing with servers or software. My time is MY time. I only ever have reciprocal relationships with employers and refuse to upset that balance.