I agree about HN's skew towards startup, but I think most full-time software engineers support businesses that are essentially available 24/7 or at least 12/7. Anything involving selling online, handling money, any kind of SaaS, or any company with worldwide customer support needs something, even if the main product engineers aren't aware of it (usually to the detriment of the people who are on-call). That's lots of startups, but it's also most blue chips or any kind of infrastructure.
> I’m a research engineer at a innovation lab.
I mean, assuming this is private, this is either an incredibly biased/exclusive or a very startup-economy-ish job itself. If your company is otherwise big enough to have a lab it's big enough there's on-call teams somewhere, and if you want to be a CTO/VP/DirEng/Architect you'd better know how they work.
There are vast amounts of software engineering roles you are ignoring. Pretty much all of embedded firmware or hardware driver development. The entire video game industry excluding online play. The many software developers that provide solutions for enterprise software with 9-5 support contracts. Mobile app developers. Whole fields of consulting and integration experts that set their own hours. Pretty much every data scientist or machine learning role ever.
It is online services that are niche. It's just what this website is mostly focused on so it seems more prominent.
> Pretty much all of embedded firmware or hardware driver development.
Any hardware used in something that has an on-call process, itself has an on-call process (or is from somewhere large enough to offer follow-the-sun support). As I said it may not involve the same engineers, but it's there.
> The entire video game industry excluding online play.
That's also a vanishingly small portion of employment in the games industry.
> Mobile app developers.
Again, most mobile apps are... for some kind of web service, or have some kind of backend, and so have some kind of on-call team.
> The many software developers that provide solutions for enterprise software with 9-5 support contracts
Examples? Just because not everyone is paying for the 5-9 contract, doesn't mean it's not there.
> Whole fields of consulting and integration experts that set their own hours.
Yes. What percentage of the industry is independent consultants? Why would you include them when I already qualified "full-time software engineers"?
> I’m a research engineer at a innovation lab.
I mean, assuming this is private, this is either an incredibly biased/exclusive or a very startup-economy-ish job itself. If your company is otherwise big enough to have a lab it's big enough there's on-call teams somewhere, and if you want to be a CTO/VP/DirEng/Architect you'd better know how they work.