Engineers are bombarded with pages left and right. There's uncertainty about how to escalate. A constant blur exists between what's urgent and what can wait. This never-ending ping-pong game takes a toll. Burnout creeps in, and your engineering culture has taken a nose dive before you know it.

How you structure alerting and on-call has serious effects on engineering culture.
It can mean the difference between a balanced workload or an over-paged part of the team who gets pulled in because "that's who helped last time."
It can mean the difference between frustrated engineers who have no control over their on-call and scheduling that's compatible with life and allows them to get coverage or step away easily.
It can mean the difference between alerts and incidents being treated as the same, leading to noise and confusion, or a deep understanding of your systems and analytics for a more sensible alert-to-noise ratio.