Pager duty is a natural consequence of devops done right; fix your shit or feel the pain. So, it's a necessary evil in systems development, IMHO. But I was on pager duty for the 10 most recent years of my career, so may have a case Stockholm syndrome.
Everything stated below about disruptions to your personal life are true. When you're on-call, you should just forget about personal commitments. When personal commitments unavoidably collide with on-call, you're at the mercy of kind teammates swapping with you.
A good team will cover you the next day if you had a bad night, but I think during every bad night, a little part of you has to say "f### this job" and given enough bad nights, well... I'm a single dad w/ a kiddo, and I can tell you there is nothing worse in life than reading a kid his bedtime story, having the pager go off in the middle of it, and having to say "sorry, son," as he begins to cry and say "not again, Daddy!" (True, and awful story.) Like I said, "f### this job."
Anyway, a funny point about devops/fix-your-shit is that there's an effect here which parallels the Peter principle (getting promoted to your level of incompetence) in some ways:
If you fix everything that causes you to get paged, then eventually the only things that page you are things you can't fix (the network, power event, etc). And while those kinds of wake-ups at least lack the adrenaline/stress component (just sit there and wait for recovery), they further reinforce the "f### this job" thoughts - because now you're literally being woken up for no reason other than to "observe and report."
Everything stated below about disruptions to your personal life are true. When you're on-call, you should just forget about personal commitments. When personal commitments unavoidably collide with on-call, you're at the mercy of kind teammates swapping with you.
A good team will cover you the next day if you had a bad night, but I think during every bad night, a little part of you has to say "f### this job" and given enough bad nights, well... I'm a single dad w/ a kiddo, and I can tell you there is nothing worse in life than reading a kid his bedtime story, having the pager go off in the middle of it, and having to say "sorry, son," as he begins to cry and say "not again, Daddy!" (True, and awful story.) Like I said, "f### this job."
Anyway, a funny point about devops/fix-your-shit is that there's an effect here which parallels the Peter principle (getting promoted to your level of incompetence) in some ways:
If you fix everything that causes you to get paged, then eventually the only things that page you are things you can't fix (the network, power event, etc). And while those kinds of wake-ups at least lack the adrenaline/stress component (just sit there and wait for recovery), they further reinforce the "f### this job" thoughts - because now you're literally being woken up for no reason other than to "observe and report."