The product has 24/7 pager coverage, but that does not mean that one person has the pager the whole time! At any given time the pager is covered by two or three people in different time zones. The way my team is structured, I will only get paged after midnight if someone else drops the page. And I only have a rotation for one week every couple months or so.
There are definitely employees who don’t enjoy having the pager, but we get compensated for holding the pager with comp time or cash (our choice). The comp time adds up to something like 3 weeks per year, and yes, there are people who take it all as vacation. No, these people are not passed over for promotions. No, this is not Europe.
So the trade off is that seven weeks a year you carry your laptop with you everywhere you go, maybe do one or two extra hours of work those weeks, and don’t go to movies or plays, and then you get three extra weeks off. Yes, it's popular. People like pager duty because they get to spend extra time with their families, because they like to go camping, or because they want the extra cash.
> People like pager duty because they get to spend extra time with their families, because they like to go camping, or because they want the extra cash.
Adequately compensating on-call is, of course, the right way to do it. All sorts of considerations that were, otherwise, problems, such as how to ensure a "fair" rotation, magically go away [1].
Unfortunately, it's vanishingly rare, at least among "silicon valley" startups (and maybe all tech companies). I suspect it's one of those pieces of Ops wisdom that's vanished from the startup ecosystem because Ops, in general, is viewed as obsolete, especially by CTOs who are really Chief Software Development Officers.
Insofar as it's a prerequisite to all your other suggestions, it makes them non-starters in such companies.
[1] Although I suppose if the compensation is too generous, there may still end up being complaining about unfairness in allocation
I prefer my midnight emergencies at a minimum.