And of course also because the risks of bad or interrupted sleep is not recognised widely and mostly ignored.
It's not like on call is a shock or something, it's not "whatever they throw at me", it's just... part of the job. My sister is a dentist, she has to be on call sometimes, it's not a shocker or something you don't know when you're signing up for the job.
You're implying that people aren't negotiating, but that's baseless. Software engineers are highly compensated because of these expectations, and we all negotiate accordingly.
Yes, and in many of them there are call-out fees and overtime. Programmers and sysadmins have convinced themselves that, as "professionals" they are not aligned with traditional working-class constructs like this.
Why is that any better than just getting paid overall more? Lots of companies also have internal policies like "if you get called in on a weekend take a long weekend next week" etc in my experience.
This is quite a sweeping statement to make. My first engineering job salary was non-negotiable. I was told to either accept it, or they 'rapidly' move to another candidate.
But I don't think it's unfair to say, especially in the US, that software engineers are highly compensated.
There is nothing immoral about deciding you’re happy.
I personally think that a much healthier alternative would be to look for a position where one can maintain their physical and mental health, and give back extra income to worthy causes. There are many organizations much more worthy of my time and money than a bunch of managers who are too cheap to hire people for a follow-the-sun support org. But I'll accept a job with on-call if I think the rest of the deal outweighs the negatives.
It's still fair to call out on-call as a negative though. It's something to be aware of when accepting a job and for companies to keep in mind when recruiting.
If those all sound awful, by all means, do something else. But they're tradeoffs that people accept for their chosen job and compensation. My first job I would regularly be in shipyards and offshore for weeks at a time supervising some job. There was a modest allowance after some length of time but it paid better--and was almost certainly more interesting--than some routine office engineering job.
It is when it sends a signal (about the job, market, etc) that also affects others.
All kinds of scumbags have their "personal truth" that justifies their actions too...
More generally, free markets are doing absurd things all the time (see Matt Levine) which makes it hard to extend moral reasoning very far without getting the equivalent of divide-by-zero errors. So I don't think we should be all that concerned about how it affects the job market in general when negotiating with an employer. You know what you want better than you know what anyone else wants. Ask to be Paid More (tm) if that's what you want, but if you don't want to, you don't have to and people saying there is some kind of moral imperative to try to become even more wealthy at a faster rate can be ignored.
That's the problem with on-call: it somehow took on moral undertones. And as a result it does not feel safe to speak out against it.
If on-call was widely seen as a negative (that a few people like because it gives them a sense of importance, more power to them) then there would be far fewer companies pushing for it as the default. As it stands, most people suffer silently for lack of an alternative. And the first step towards change is to make it OK to publicly say that on-call's a negative, a health hazard, and other options exist (though they may cost more).
2. I doubt this is true. I've worked (and do work) for fortune 500 companies and have never ever heard of a CEO being paged for some sort of emergency. Presumably there can be some sort of crisis where they'll have to be involved within some reasonable time (extremely rare) but that's not exactly the same thing. That's why they have people working for them. That's not to say that some CEOs (especially for smaller companies) don't work very hard.
"presumably there can be some sort of crisis [...] but that's not exactly the same thing." - I'd say that it's exactly the same thing; on-call engineers are (or should be) just on an escalation path for crisis/emergency events; top managers are higher up in the escalation chain (if it's not a routine thing that others can easily resolve) but they're on escalation chain for every aspect of a large company. Of course, those events need to be rare - for example, as the original article states, up to 2-3 actual calls per year for a person being on-call; we should probably make a serious distinction between "on-call for emergencies" (which should be rare) and "routine out-of-hours support" (which might get triggered every week or even more frequently, obviously not an extraordinary event but a standard business process), which is something quite different and should have different solutions than emergency escalation.
It's not necessarily some kind of inferiority complex or anything else, it's about the free market.
It is a painful slap in the face when the market doesn't price what you have to offer as high a you like. I know a friend who was convinced that her calling was to be an artist, but always had a hard time selling her works, and often complained about the unfairness of life. I guess she was "bound" by monetary considerations by not being able to make ends meet as an artist. Eventually she gave up and became a hospital lab tech and is well compensated. So the market was telling her that her skills as a hospital lab tech were much more valuable to society than her skills as an artist, even if her own preferences were otherwise.
At the same time, some other artist can buy an entire oceanside condo for one painting, because the market does value their output very highly.
That's all that we're talking about here. It is "free" but that doesn't mean that you'll be able to get whatever you want in exchange for your own output.