> I mention on-call duty because it is “peculiar” in that the only other profession requiring this kind of responsiveness is doctors, literal lifesavers. When you go on-call for the first time, it’s terrifying and tells you “holy crap, this is serious.”

A key difference is that the oncall engineer is usually able to directly influence the quality and robustness of the systems being watched. Sort of like preventative medicine, but much more direct.

Crappy teams make crappy software that pages often (or not at all if their ops fails to write any meaningful alerts)