@multiheaded1793 replied to your post “>prevents any company with critical infrastructure from having any...”
except of course it's not *tripling* the number of people, you'd expect each off-shift workers to be covering for several regular ones! obviously less viable for tiny companies but still.
No, it is in fact tripling the number of people, even at big companies. In order to handle an on-call shift, you have to understand the system you’re handling as well as one of the people who do regular work on it. Gaining that understanding is the most time-consuming thing a professional programmer does, and it has to be constantly maintained (with very little substitute for actively developing with the code, which is why I have some doubts that even with triple-staffing you’d get results as effective as just doing normal on-call rotation). Even with nothing to do 90% of the time, it would take an exceptionally good programmer/SRE to be able to keep up their knowledge well enough to handle the on-call problems for multiple projects simultaneously.
I would be fine with a law mandating that there be max(X%, Y€) extra salary for anyone who accepts on-call duties, and that it must be uncoercedly opt-in (though you’d have to allow hiring to take it into account, so the spots could be filled). That’s a fair policy which would cut down on exploitation. But banning it entirely is just keeping software development out of France except for little branches that exist 90% for PR so that the French Government doesn’t throw a hissy-fit and support another goddamn stupid censoring law or more frivolous lawsuits.