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> I mention on-call duty because it is “peculiar” in that the only other profession requiring this kind of responsiveness is doctors

Uh, not even close. I used to get up at 4am EST to trade European markets for a hedge fund. I was on call 24/7/365. I had my laptop and Bloomberg fingerprint scanner with me on any trip I took.

And this is just my experience. I have had many friends in engineering, management consulting, fin tech, etc who have similar demands made of them.

I’m not saying it’s right, but it is part of the rules of the game that we all sign up to. There’s a reason all of the aforementioned jobs pay so well.




In the military, we had a 2 hour recall for a large chunk of our battalion, about 200 people for a few months at a time. If you got a call, you were expected to be ready to go in less than 2 hours. Social norms meant the expectation was closer to 45 minutes than 2 hours.

I think oncall is a common requirement for anything involving large sums of money, treatment of high risk injuries, or geopolitical power struggles.


One I hadn’t even considered (typical stereotype here: no friends who are in the armed forces). But yeah I imagine loads of others (military, EMT, police) are in a similar situation.




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