The Context Switching Cost of On-Call Work, and How Teams Reduce It
Ask an engineer what on-call costs them and most will describe a page at three in the morning. Those nights are real, and they are also comparatively rare on a healthy rota. Teams plan for them, compensate for them, and talk about them openly. The larger cost is quieter and almost never discussed, because it does not look like an incident. It is what happens to an ordinary Tuesday when you are carrying the pager: work arrives in fragments, nothing deep gets finished, and by Friday you have been busy for five days without being able to say what you built.