Eh the whole point of being on call is that you are effectively assigned to ensure that you're ready to jump on incidents quickly at off hours if needed.
This depends on the importance you assign to on-call.
And that value is usually defined by the likelihood of incidents and the impact of these.
If you constantly have incidents that are critical, you can either spend the engineering hours to fix the problems once and for all. If that is not possible because it's a different problem every time, it might be important to invest in more engineering resources and have them work shifts.
Printing for example has such a system where the impact of a stopped printing press can be catastrophic because no newspapers tomorrow. Thus there are on-site engineers that are paid to sit around and wait for a press to stop working.
If the occurrence of an incident is rare or the impact of them is basically nil for whatever reason, feel free to consider on-call not that important. Maybe an SLA of 6 hours is acceptable in such a situation.
If incidents are happening often and are important yet you do not want to spring for extra engineers but have your existing staff work on these on top of their regular duties, you need to come up with the right incentives. Massive pay helps to sweeten the deal and also provides incentives to prevent pages.
I agree with that, but all I am saying is being on call shouldn't stop you from having a drink or two and hanging out with friends. Life is boring otherwise being worried about this. :)
I'm not sure tobacco is a good comparison here. Tobacco was a relatively easy thing to tax/restrict/ban as it serves no real purpose beyond individual enjoyment.
And about the time governments started taxing the shit out of tobacco is also about the time tobacco use was starting to become quite unfashionable. Why would I or my friends care about not being able to smoke in a bar if we find smoky bars annoying? Hypothetically try passing such taxes in the 60s, see how far that would have gotten.
Point being: carbon tax? That hits everyone to some extent, and arguably hits those least likely to care about climate change the most.
Denying climate change is also becoming unfashionable, while vegetarianism and electric cars become fashionable. These are good trends that have been slowed down for many years by corporate campaigns such as Global Climate Coalition [1]. The same thing happened with tobacco.
That's also the case at Amazon. And likely most large organizations. It's not a strict stack rank but an expectation that over a certain population size, there is a certain percentage of under-performers. It's also used as a method of calibration. Performance evaluations are hard.
