I see a fair amount of sentiment in this thread that's averse to what from my perspective is a very light on-call schedule. My former employer was a manufacturing plant that operated 24/7. The engineers (not software, mostly chemical, mechanical, and electrical), all of us carried pagers at all times and were expected to phone in within minutes of being paged, any day or night. A bad enough incident would require you to drive to work and be physically present to resolve it. There was no notion of pager duty -- you just always wore a pager. You had to let everybody on the team know if you were going to be out of pager range. On top of that, we had a rotating support schedule that required one person on a team of five to be at the facility every weekend.
And if you think that's bad, let me tell you about my friend. He's the only cardiologist in town...
And if you think that's bad, let me tell you about my friend. He's the only cardiologist in town...