> Also, in my experience, the people who aren't getting woken up at 3am (aka. your boss) don't value the time and effort needed to stabilize these systems.

There's the rub. The issue isn't being on-call, it's not prioritizing making sure the system is robust so that on-call is boring.

In my last job there was no formal on-call, but if shit was going bad I'd be expected to resolve it, or track down the right resources to do so. In my current there is a formal on-call rotation. In my 15 years at the previous job I probably got called out of bed 3-4 times (and due to my roll I was the first call, if anyone got woken up, I did, and then had to wake anyone else needed). In my 7 months in the new job it hasn't happened yet.

When everything is on fire, it feels obvious to me that asking your $x00k employee to put it out isn't unreasonable. What is unreasonable is making that the plan instead of having robust fire-prevention systems and making that the exception.

> Congratulations, you are now a $40/hr employee!

Another way of thinking about this is that you've invested 10 dollars of your paycheck into your career. I worked way more than 50 hours a week when I started my career. Subsequently, I was able to drop out of school early (by 2 years, saving 10s of thousands of dollars), get a full time job, increase my compensation by 50% within 2 years, and then by 200% the following year when I changed companies.

By your math I'm sure I was getting paid 1/3rd of my actual compensation. But that has more than paid off in terms of the investment.

You're making the assumption that being on-call made some kind of difference to your career progression--as other commenters have noted, no one is doing good or interesting work during on call hours. You're just the company bitch and you get to do bitch work. Other industries require hazing like this too: finance comes to mind. But not every software firm requires on-call; you just picked the wrong company and allowed yourself to get screwed.

As a manager, yes it did. Managers are simple people. All they do most of the time is try to figure out who is critical and who is expendable (invest or tolerate). While it's not the only path to the invest bucket, putting out a fire in the middle of the night is a quick way to land there. It's often a good way to prove yourself in early career scenarios when you don't have a ton of architectural pull power.

> You're making the assumption that being on-call made some kind of difference to your career progression

Two things.

1) I didn't just put in on-call overtime. I put in "free" hours in general.

2) I'm not really making a big assumption. Unsurprisingly working a lot of hours gave a very positive impression of me and I was able to easily justify raises and promotions when I asked.

Calling on-call hazing or bitch work is stupid, I'm not engaging with this.