The engineers who leave over on-call are rarely the ones who complain about it. They're the ones who quietly absorb everything, resolve incidents fast, never escalate, and one day accept an offer somewhere else. By the time you notice the pattern, you've already lost the person the rotation was grinding down. Three mistakes that create that outcome. Measuring shifts per engineer instead of load per engineer. Equal shifts are not equal load. A week with two P1 incidents resolved in 20 minutes each is not the same as a week with twelve alerts that each require 45 minutes of investigation at 2am. If you track only who was on-call and not what that shift actually cost, you will consistently underestimate the burden on your senior engineers, who resolve things faster but get paged more often because they're trusted to handle anything. Track actionable pages per shift per engineer. If one person consistently receives 3x the load of others, the rotation is broken regardless of how the calendar looks.…