Your pager buzzes you awake in the dead of night, an alert in one of your systems demands your attention. You manage to identify the issue and apply a fix in twelve minutes flat.
We as a society have chosen to accept this as a standard behavior, we've even assigned a positive term to it - ownership.
The word "ownership" is doing a lot of work
As we enter the middle of 2026, a debate is heating up about whether on-call is unpaid overtime or merely a salary premium. I believe it's all in how you frame it.
Being on-call with a pager constantly isn't a responsibility. It's a job. And calling it "taking ownership" washes that job of work into an attribute of one's character.
