Yeah we have a few talks about this and a chapter about this very issue in https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/seeking-sre/97814919788.... Totally agree that in a well designed system the sources of data loss are certainly not disk failures.

As far as I know Magic Pocket has had 100% durability, but that's obviously beside the point.

Google pays people, both in cash, and/or in compensatory time off. This is specifically called out in the SRE book [0].

They've noted that it's important to pay compensation, both to be fair to the employees, and as a closed-loop feedback mechanism to ensure the business prioritizes fixing pages. This concept of business feedback is also discussed in a chapter of the terrific Seeking SRE book, chapter "Against On-Call: A Polemic" [1].

> Compensation Adequate compensation needs to be considered for out-of-hours support. Different organizations handle on-call compensation in different ways;

> Google offers time-off-in-lieu or straight cash compensation, capped at some proportion of overall salary.

> The compensation cap represents, in practice, a limit on the amount of on-call work that will be taken on by any individual.

> This compensation structure ensures incentivization to be involved in on-call duties as required by the team, but also promotes a balanced on-call work distribution and limits potential drawbacks of excessive on-call work, such as burnout or inadequate time for project work.

[0] https://landing.google.com/sre/sre-book/chapters/being-on-ca... (search Compensation) [1] http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920063964.do