Earlier quoted context omitted.
They can use an online service in the middle of the night, but as a citizen, I'd be upset if I learned my public library were paging someone in the middle of the night if it weren't working. That's incredibly inappropriate. It can wait. Like I said in another comment, computers generally don't just randomly stop working, but no, a library worker doesn't need their computer at 9am so badly that they need an on-call IT…
> a library worker doesn't need their computer at 9am so badly that they need an on-call IT worker (and presumably some kind of middle-of-the-night monitoring) to ensure it before they get in. A single worker probably doesn't, yes. In contrast, hundreds of people being unable to do anything when they come to work in the morning is not a terrible reason to call someone and have them login for a few minutes. Back to th…
If those users just say "oh, okay, I'll check back in a couple hours", then okay. Again, this is not hundreds of thousands of people without power or water or something. It's viewing or uploading to an archive. Like, if you're a user, do you really want someone woken up at 3am because you can't use the wayback machine right now? Because "they should take it seriously"? There's a person actually having to deal with that because... you really want to get that one Grateful Dead concert video from their free archive right now? I'm happy to say that yeah I hope their engineers aren't on-call after hours. I would much prefer that they get a good night's rest rather than fix it for me. I hope they're a cool place to work without delusional, psychopathic management.
Perhaps put another way, is there any computer service now that doesn't need a guarantee? Or is everything just critical now?
My point isn't that on-call is overcomplicating, it's that inventing and chasing an SLA often leads to expensive complicated systems (which, ironically, can often directly lead to lower uptime), and on-call has a human cost.