This isn't a programming question per se – more about application management. I work for what started out as quite a small company, which has grown rather quickly and become very succesful in a relatively small period of time. Nearly all trade happens online, and our IT team is very small relative to the amount of money that gets pumped through the site (it's me and two others).
There are occasionally "blips" in the framework outside of hours, which inevitably results in either myself or one of my colleagues receiving a phone call. Our call centre aren't particularly great at analyzing errors etc.. and 99% of the time the solution is actually a data entry / user training issue. 1% of the time it's a real bug.
Our company is now insisting that we three developers figure out an on-call rota where we can be contacted with assurances that we won't be out of town etc. unpaid whether we are called or not, in case something goes wrong out of hours. Not all of our skills overlap, so I may not be able to quickly diagnose and fix a problem that one of the others could (e.g. database timeouts would need the DBA, email issues would need our infrastructure guy, website issues would need me).
None of us are particularly happy about this, so I was wondering if anyone else has had a similar experience and how you dealt with the situation?
EDIT: Thanks all for the suggestions – I've marked one as the right answer purely on the basis as it made me feel a bit better, but all suggestions are pretty much bang on what we've been discussing internally. We do feel like it's a little unfair we now have to give up our weekends so everyone else can get rich. We are attempting to push towards a more mature development process to minimize bugs too, but that would require the rest of the company to change too and they really don't want anything to change outside of IT!
Best Answer
I am disappointed at the number of answers here that suggest that the OP should get paid for his after hours support when he clearly states in the question that management will not not only leave it up to them to determine how after hours support will be handled, but also that they will NOT reimburse them extra in anyway.
I am going to tell you from experience that when a small company rises quickly like this that management "sees green" and looks for ways to maximize the windfall profits, or they still haven't adjusted IT budgets to a much higher revenue and operate on a small company poverty budget.
It will get worse before it gets better and you might want to explore other opportunities.
In the meantime to make your horribly unfair experience a little more bearable, try to find out where front-end support is lacking and bolster their knowledge base as much as you can. Try directly training them how to handle common issues, write them helpful tools to do their job better, and improve training and help documentation. This will be the most effective way to improve your immediate situation.