Being on call isn’t that bad if you find ways to learn from it and make it worth your time and effort. Henrik covers to “why’s”, alarms and alerting systems, and even compensation and scheduling. Henrik writes:

For most of the past ten years, I have been on organized on call rotations for the systems I have been developing. I think being on call is a logical way of taking responsibility for your work. You also learn a lot from it. However, it is stressful and an inconvenience, so you should get paid for it.