I've never had a startup that hasn't roped me into a production support on-call for a month or more in addition to regular duties. Under 10 engineers, 50 engineers, 500+ engineers: they've all done this.

I've never worked on a product where it ever made sense to be "on call." I'm an engineer, not a doctor.

If something goes catastrophically wrong at 1am, caused by some unforeseen bug in the code, who fixes it? Who diagnoses that an issue flooding the logs is not an issue with your software but something else down the line?

I think it makes sense to have an on-call rota. Some people do it for a week or so. Cycle it through the team.

There needs to be someone knowledgeable to call in case of issues.

The disconnect seems to be that it isn't mentioned before the offer. If the employee is expecting normal hours but finds out after the fact that the employer actually demands more on-call than was initially discussed, how could that be interpreted as anything other than a bait-and-switch?

We fix it when we see it's broken, which isn't going to happen at 1am local time. If we have a distributed team the odds are better it gets fixed sooner. The world keeps spinning and there's always another bug to fix, it's not worth losing literal sleep over.

> There needs to be someone knowledgeable to call in case of issues

"Thank you for calling. Our normal business hours are ..." works for the rest of the business world, there's no reason it can't work for you. You can always sell 24h tech support for more money, or make products that don't break in the middle of the night by not relying on systems and designs that are likely to fail spectacularly in the middle of the night.

That doesn't work if gmail goes down. Or netflix. Or an ISP. Or any product that is primarily used by people outside business hours, e.g. xbox live. "Sorry several million people couldn't play games this weekend, the outage was outside normal business hours."

Lots of products need uptime guarantees.

Sure.

But I bet the people working on those don’t say their employer unexpectedly “roped me into a production support on-call”.

If a role isn’t advertised as having responsibility outside regular office hours, bait and switching people into regularly working outside 9-5 type hours should not be allowed. And “not allowed” with serious enough financial teeth that companies right up to FAANG size would care, or at least that employees leaving/fired from bait and switching employment hours would end up feeling satisfied with their payouts.

If you need uptime guarantees, hire people letting them know up front so they can choose to accept or reject that work. You don’t (or at least shouldn’t) get to drop that responsibility on people who never signed up for it in the first place.

Agreed but it should be paid.

Other fields have separate teams or overtime; salary-exempt isn't something an individual person can realistically negotiate against a company (imo).

Other fields don’t release new version of their product every few days. Oncall for things that are always changing is very hard to be done by people who aren’t ones making those changes. You need formal release process and expecting training for each change. That’s not how 99.99% of internet businesses work.

I'll note that only the largest of those companies had this deployment style. The rest were either ~quarterly (with client pressure to slow that down) or weekly/monthly (agile-ish).

I think the only one with a formal release process was the quarterly release outfit, and even that was due to single-client risk.

This was the first thing that really shocked me at my first job (startup in SF back over a decade ago). The attitude that what we're doing really matters, and if something was found broken on the weekend we'd get a call and have to come into the office. Fucking absurd hubris all throughout SV.

Very little of what most people do "matters" from a certain point of view. But everyone has to eat and there are plenty of products that make money that might not "matter" but offer jobs. We can't all work for Tesla or SpaceX.

if the only thing that mattered is some system being down not making some suit money, and mgmt has no respect for the work, it doesn’t matter. i work to feed myself not because it matters.

To earn a living.

It’s probably obvious, but I’d suggest never working on a product doctors use.

Agreed: well-run startups can still compete by making smart, focused decisions.

I've worked at 3 startups (5th employee, 16th employee, 2nd employee).

The first one had 80 hour weeks and burned me out after a year. The company had enough capital to stay in business, but never went anywhere, and my shares were washed out in subsequent funding rounds.

The second had 40 hour weeks and I worked there for six years. A fair-to-middling exit to Broadcom.

The third one had 40 hour weeks and I worked there for 3 years. A great exit to Google.

I completely agree, sure if you’re into a feature and on a roll in a startup keep going but if you’ve reached a good point to stop no need to cause yourself stress!

There are definitely days I work late, but that's almost always by choice. When I do work late, it means shorter days for me later in the week.

> can count the number of times I've had to work overtime with a null-pointer - 0.

Sounds to me like you've malloc'd all of memory.