I'm Germany HR should be punishing managers for doing that, as a single call is basically directly an entire day of new vacation time, plus punitive damages for disturbing the employee. Of course employees who can't afford to bankroll the lawsuit tend to get shafted.

> it does seem that most tech jobs expect you to be available after hours for calls and extend that to vacation by default

Not any tech job I’ve ever had, except very occasionally after hours if unavoidable due to working with people in Asia, and planned well in advance. Never during vacation, that would be crazy.

But there have probably been people on my same teams who thought it was expected, due to them being workaholics or just bad at sticking to boundaries.

You have a separate team for on-call? Never need to do off-hours elevations? That sounds wild.

Obviously on-call is an exception. That would fall under “rare and planned in advance”.

Except for my very first job when I was running shipyard jobs, no one has ever expected that they'd be able to reach me off-hours though they may have left messages of various types.