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It's your point of view. I know lots of developers who don't care about extra days off, they just want the additional $$ for being on call (if there are no issues it's just easy money). The same for the rare occasion they need to handle some issue (night overtime is paid x2). We have an on-call schedule in our dept which is filled up on a voluntary basis. Every time we add new months to it (it's Google spreadsheet), they are "sold out" within few hours.

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I think if companies need to pay with "days off" instead of "money" they would be much more carefull with on-call and have a much greater incentive to make the on-call - not call, proper procedure, taking care of on-call incidents so they don't repeat. They would empower developers to make sure to minimize it so they don't have a penalty of dev-on-vacation. when you have an oncall with fixed payment per hours, you just don't have enough incentive to minimize the effect, you have those people handling it on on-call payment.

The incentive is to get paid and don't have any issues to handle. And it works - we rarely have any issues off-hours, and if there are any - we are sure to quickly get rid of the cause, so we can continue to get paid for being on call without actually doing any work.

With this approach company loses long term, IMHO. Productivity goes down (8 hours work day + on call, next day again) + company pays extra.

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