Why do you think the real reason is not “because they cannot fix shit if needed”. Seems the most reasonable to me.

At least in my experience, managers (engineering managers, sorry for not being more explicit. I didn’t mean product managers or similar) have a good number of years of experience as software engineers before turning into managers. They are not clueless about the products we built and maintain. So, even if junior engineers are on-call, why on earth an engineer manager with over 10 years of coding experience cannot be on call as well? In my experience, the answer is: because being oncall is shit, and upper management cannot force middle level managers to be on call.

Sounds reasonable but misses the mark, sorry. Once you become a manager you rapidly lose hands on skills. The big picture never goes away, but the details go pretty quick. If you don’t use, you do lose it.

Strong maybe on that from my side. It really depends on where you work. But in every startup I have worked with and have been on call, there was quickly at least a middle manager joined to see if he can provide something of value (in most situations he will for instance call other teams members as needed or coodinate with teams in other timezones).

I think, in the end, it's a bit of both, you need to care about the product to actually do it, but you are also correct in that the tradeoff has to be worth it.

> Your theory doesn’t work… otherwise why managers are not on-call

First it’s not a theory but observations. Many of them.

Second, i dont see how your argument refutes the theory if it was a theory?

Managers may and in fact are usually on call from what I personally have seen. They just have different type of oncall within their areas of competence, and it’s often bat called “oncall”.