On-Call Culture Costs More Than Companies Admit, Engineers Argue

A software industry perspective published on DEV Community argues that the true cost of on-call duty begins long before any incident alert fires, encompassing disrupted evenings, missed social plans, and constant low-level anxiety. The author contends that businesses routinely underprice this burden by treating on-call as a default job responsibility rather than a genuine sacrifice. Follow-the-sun models, where responsibility rotates across global time zones, are presented as the fairest solution but remain out of reach for most smaller organisations. For companies without that scale, splitting support into tiered layers with regional partners is suggested as a partial workaround. The piece warns that jumping straight to a rota without deliberate design work shifts hidden human costs onto engineers while keeping them invisible to the business.