Yeah, being oncall for something like a well behaved backend system may be quite nice. I was an SRE for YouTube, and it was an almost constant bloodbath. YouTube's code changes at a relatively fast pace, there's a ton of developers, and it depends on a ton of different backends, and a problem with any of them would make us suffer. To make it worse I had a bit of bad luck, and was a magnet for weird and unlikely outages (bracing for my shift was a running joke in the team). So, if I was oncall at home it usually meant that shit started happening before breakfast and I didn't get enough quiet time to take my 10 minute bus ride to the office :)

This said, I really enjoyed the experience. Yes, it was tiring and stressful, but it was also super interesting and exciting. Being responsible for such a huge site was incredible, and the feeling of figuring out how to overcome a big outage was exhilarating. I actually miss the pager drama from time to time (my wife does not).