salaried software engineers (in california at least) are exempt employees and thus don't have to be paid overtime.
I'm pretty sure if you are not an exempt salaried employee or you are hourly then you do in fact have to be paid for the time on call that you are actually working and if you are not that is in fact illegal and wage theft.
Anecdotally I have a friend who works in IT that is on call and does get paid for all the time on call that he is working.
as another response said on call can or can not be exploitative depending on how it's setup but that is a separate issue from whether it's wage theft.
> Anecdotally I have a friend who works in IT that is on call and does get paid for all the time on call that he is working.
That's actually very common, at least around here outside of the startup scene. There's usually a fixed amount for just being on call, plus an hourly rate (often higher than regular rate) for actually having to do anything.
Last time I managed a team of on-call staff, they all got paid for 2hrs at their regular rate for each weekday and 4hrs for each weekend day they were on call (whether they got called or not), plus time and a half for every hour they worked (rounded up to a minimum of 1hr per incident, so three 5 minute "quick fixes" counted at 3hrs at time and a half, which on a weekend meant 7hrs additional pay). We tried to make sure everyone by default got a rotation of a week of weekdays, a single two day weekend, then a whole week of just office hours. They were free to negotiate swaps amongst themselves as needed (it there was not required payroll adjustment), and to request schedule adjustments as needed (mostly for when the change would need payroll to be informed). We ended up averaging fewer than 10% of on-call shifts getting paged. Everybody was happy enough with that arrangement - it was about as good as any on-call arrangement I've ever been part of.
I've done that for production support on an ecommerce site we developed before fully handing off to the client. Spreading the on call work as much as possible among the dev team I think is ideal, because it adds a shared incentive to employ good practices during the day to reduce incidents after hours.
Taking the shifts was optional and had a similar pay structure.
I'm pretty sure if you are not an exempt salaried employee or you are hourly then you do in fact have to be paid for the time on call that you are actually working and if you are not that is in fact illegal and wage theft.
Anecdotally I have a friend who works in IT that is on call and does get paid for all the time on call that he is working.
as another response said on call can or can not be exploitative depending on how it's setup but that is a separate issue from whether it's wage theft.