When did on-call become so accepted and demanded from employers? Currently I am "Release Captain" for a week: So I have to setup any releases and manage all the related tasks, do automated/manual testing of the release, release (enabling toggles and any config changes). Then Backup to secondary and primary for a week: About once or twice I am asked to help with tickets. Then for 14 days we alternate primary / secondary. Thursday to Thursday is our deal. Every ~40 days I am in one of the above. It's absolutely miserable.

I have never had this much time spent doing non-development related tasks. For 4 weeks every 1.5 months I can't have a life at all. This just screams to me that we are forcing broken software/not complete software out the gate a building huge piles of technical debt that will never get the focus. I remember a time when I would start at 9am and end at 6pm every day and never heard a peep about production issues unless the support engineers couldn't figure it out. Which maybe happened twice a year. To make matters worse most things are not allowed to be touched in production with the risk of being fired for making changes. So if you want to "fix" any data or call xyz service you need high ranking approval. It's like being tortured!

> When did on-call become so accepted and demanded from employers?

As a 50 something year old software engineer. Its always been like this. I'm kinda shocked at how reluctant the new generation is to support the systems. Sure we'd all prefer strict 9-5 hours but most companies rely on software to stay in business and you need experts available in case things go wrong.