Curious how this is the case. Do European companies not provide 24/7 services? Or staff a "follow the sun" model so no one has to answer pages outside of working hours? Do Europeans write better code so they don't need on-call?
I've worked at a few FAANGs in the US, and every single one after 2010 had an on-call rotation.
We totally have on-call, but we're also weaponizing German labor laws to force the company to have their shit together. There are a few interesting parts in there that cause quite the discomfort for employers:
The way contracts are worded, time working on on-call is work-time. Kinda obvious if you write it like that. As such, bad on-call weeks easily cut into the normal duties of the employee. This means team leads have an incentive to reduce time wasted on on-call.
You have mandatory rest-times. If an on-call activity takes an hour or so to fix, the person is suddenly not allowed to work for 10 hours due to these rest-time and maximum work time laws. Suddenly, "some little fixing at night" means the person isn't allowed to work the whole morning.
With a few rules like that, pages become really painful to the company. When a bad application kept pinging on-call every night for a few days, the entire normal work ground to a halt with people being unavailable, other team members dropping project work from sprints to pick up daily business slack. Some product managers got really pissed off and things in that product improved - I'm kinda curious what happened behind closed doors there. .
It's actually 11h of mandatory downtime "between shifts"; this does indeed provide for theoretical opportunity to get good sleep for people with a short enough commute.
Nothing like that in Canada or, I suspect, the USA. You'd be expected to work the morning after.
I think it's mostly down to three factors:
1. Uncompensated oncall is legally tricky in many EU companies, so a lot of midsize companies look at the cost of paying for oncall, or sometimes just the time of administering paying for oncall, and decide they can do without. High frequency oncall is also often restricted (e.g. more than 1 week in 6 is not legal here)
2. A lot of the smaller companies are europeans selling to europeans, and are much more used to a business culture of availability during office hours. Especially there's a bigger share of like b2b back office stuff in europe compared to like, restaurant POS systems.
3. Larger companies do seem more into follow the sun. A lot of the big tech in europe are subsidiaries of US companies, so if they're in Europe it means they've already opened one remote location, and therefore are more likely to have another (California, Europe, India is a super common arrangement)
Never had on call in 25 years with American startups. Surprised that faangs have on call but offer no support or limited that may take days to get a response from a customer perspective.
Had some level of "on-call" in the sense that "there's a bug with your new/recent code and customer needs a fix" or "the demo isn't working and we present tomorrow" or "checkin deadline is in 2 weeks and my code isn't ready" pressure in 20+ years in silicon valley working at a startup and 2 medium size companies. The startup had a bit more since I knew lots of sysadmin stuff so I could help at times when our main IT guy wasn't available - but he was quite good and didn't let me have root access anyway, so it's not like I could have fixed it on those rare occasions.
Mind you, I interviewed for a Yahoo Mail job that would have included wearing a pager (back in '05). And I know it's pretty common - I've been fortunate to not have that be an issue. Hoping for another ~5 years at the current job until I can retire.