If Jeff is reading this: hopefully it should be apparent that these stories of constant out-of-hours calls indicate incompetent management. Note I'm not talking about the "human" side of this (obviously that's pretty bad), but rather this is just bad engineering, bad management, bad business. If you've built software that generates constant support escalations when deployed, you need to fix that software so it does not do so! If it turns out the software is working just fine but the humans involved like to call people all the time, then arrange for some people to be in the office during working hours (heck, which continents does Amazon NOT have offices in??) to soothe them. Or perhaps fire the people who like to make unnecessary support calls. My point: this all indicates a very broken process and the process is the thing that needs to be fixed, rather than "being nicer" about the fact that your developer needs to be no more than 15 minutes from a WiFi network...
Disclosure: I'm part of a small team that runs a high-availability service, without constant middle-of-the-night alerts..
>> If you've built software that generates constant support escalations when deployed, you need to fix that software so it does not do so!
It has been my observation that this is a conscious decision. If you can build a culture where you can have people being willing to show up for work at all the odd hours as the norm then you can afford poor software practices. In places like these rushed software that has bugs but meets the majority of the use cases well enough is what is expected. And you ARE expected to show up at odd times to fix what breaks.
I mean, its not as if it costs the company more to have you come in late or have you working at all the odd hours. They still pay you only what they pay you. To hell with your work life balance - it's not as if doing this as had any blowback in terms of attrition.
This person seems to have remained in Amazon for over 6 years - where they likely created millions of dollars in value in return for whatever money they made.
If you grow a backbone and turn down the calls at odd hours, you can expect to receive blowback and unreasonable treatment from a direction you didn't expect.
This is very important. There needs to be an "agile manifesto" style awakening on this, so that business people also understand that software quality matters a lot. Perhaps I'll do a writeup at some point...
Disclosure: I'm part of a small team that runs a high-availability service, without constant middle-of-the-night alerts..
Also, I am a long-time AMZN stock holder.