Yeah, on the whole I'd say doctor's WLB is a lot worse, especially considering what I've heard about residencies. And I think a developer can find a job with better WLB much easier than a doctor.

I just think that tech, especially startups, don't handle overtime well. A service might not need to have high availability, and if it does there a ways to manage operations well. Leadership focusing on quality, so that production issues are minimized is good. Explicit on-call schedules can provide benefits if it's not a ton of work, being on-call is definitely a negative. But knowing that you don't need to be available at all is better than not having an on-call schedule. Shift work, with the focus on explicitly dividing up the schedule between employees can provide that benefit.

I haven't worked at Google, but the Google SRE book mentions a lot of things I like. Like giving the option for cash compensation for overtime, requiring postmortems for on-call incidents, capping the percentage of ops work, and having multi-site teams to minimize night shifts all sound like great ideas.

I think there are a lot of situations where service reliability could be improved while making things easier on sysadmins and developers.