Yeah, I worked in a couple companies that had the same requirements.
It also meant having to wake up on command in case the phone beeped, being unable to drink in my free time, being limited in which activities I could go to.
It was hell.
I know people are gonna hit back with "you're doing it wrong", but in this case it's the company doing it wrong, but nobody on HN will go there and tell them.
The only profession where there is a legitimate case for the "cannot drink in free time" requirement is Emergency medicine physicians. And even among physicians, they are some of the highest paid specialities. For most other cases it is simply the company trying to extract as much juice as possible from the existing working staff.
That's absolutely insane. I've argued with a CEO about on-call burdens being too heavy before, and that was with a roster of three people who were only available 7am to 7pm.
What kind of slave driver expects literal 24/7/365 availability? Does that not breach labour laws where you work?
The on-call rotation had escalation, and instead of going to the manager it went to someone else in the team. Since there were only two backend engineers in my team, I was either always 1st or 2nd (clown emoji).
Unfortunately this is a huge hole in German labour law.
I quit there pretty fast, after a couple months. It was a tourism company, so Corona treated them very well.
The other company where this happened was a Content Marketing company that was wiped out by ChatGPT. I didn't do on-call there but the other team did.
It also meant having to wake up on command in case the phone beeped, being unable to drink in my free time, being limited in which activities I could go to.
It was hell.
I know people are gonna hit back with "you're doing it wrong", but in this case it's the company doing it wrong, but nobody on HN will go there and tell them.