We got it figured out. There's no way they're not going to pay me what I'm worth — I'll just demand it all up front. Yes, I will be a salary person and I will make a set sum of money per year no matter how much I work.
No matter how much.
The fact that I've explicitly capped my income while deliberately not capping my hours has no way of backfiring. I'm not even on call 24/7 for more than a week or so a month. And those after hours “all hands on deck” emergencies where I have no input but have to be on a zoom call for hours just to seem like a “team player” don't happen more than 10 or so days per month. And the constant checking of my email and various other ways my employer keeps in constant contact isn't really invasive. Being available 24/7 is completely worth the security of a steady paycheck. I'm not exploited at all.
Oh man, gotta go, prod just went down again. Nobody uses it at night anyway and we usually get it fixed before morning. Kinda weird, though, if we spent just a little time and money fixing it up during the day it wouldn't crash all the time. I wonder why management doesn't want to invest in that? Anyway, see y'all at 4AM when we're done doing this same thing we do after hours over and over and over.
Edit: When I put “salary person” in the first paragraph it had corrected to “salary prison.” NGL, I debated a bit on which to keep.