I've been on my current team for about 5 years, working on a back end data processing product. When I joined, our business model was licensing that product to customers for on premise use, and selling support. Now we are launching a managed cloud service, and my team is being asked to take an on call rotation for the first time. It's been a long time since I had an on call rotation, and I'm trying to get some perspective about it.

The schedule is roughly two 12-hour weekday shifts (which overlap normal working hours somewhat) every month, and two 12-hour weekend shifts (i.e. a Saturday shift and a Sunday shift) every quarter. We have enough variety of time zones that I don't think any of these shifts are full overnight shifts; the latest ends at around 1am and the earliest starts at around 5am in the local times. Shift swapping is allowed.

These shifts are L1 for our product specifically, meaning first responders to any alerts on that product, and also responsible for escalations from other parts of the system, e.g. the infrastructure SRE team. We have some ability to configure our own alerting, but obviously it has to ultimately conform to the service we're promising to deliver. None of this is live yet, so we have no data on what the page rate will look like.

The company is offering some additional pay for this work. The exact details of that plan are very complicated, but working through a few examples, it looks like for most folks it'll be between 2% and 4% of their base salary.

As I said, it's been a long time since I worked an on call gig, and I have no idea if a schedule like this is good, bad, or average in the industry today. I don't object to doing on call in general, but I'd like to know if I'm getting taken advantage of here. Thanks!