> At no point have I ever worked outside of contracted hours, and at no point will I ever do so. Sorry, no, once I did and it lead to me leaving the job..!
"At no point have I ever worked outside of contracted hours" but "once I did"? Anyway, you probably worked at large companies only; I work in a startup and if the other ops guy is offline I do work off-hours because, well, the website won’t go back up by itself.
There are 2 cases you should be working on weekends:
1) First 2-3 years of career - In these times you learn by simply doing, so if you work on weekends you speed up your learning curve. Past 2-3 years you don't learn anything by doing normal work, so you need your weekends to do actual "levelling up".
2) You have equity in the business or you have a bonus structure that compensates weekend work.
If you are outside those 2 cases, and you are working more than 5 weekends a year (say 2-3 weekends per 6 months for true random business emergencies that almost everyone in the org has to do), you need to leave.
The GP is saying that his website fails outside of the contracted hours as well as inside of them.
And yes, an emergency here or there is normal in smaller companies. If they start happening several times in a single year, it's a sign that something is very wrong, but it's not reasonable to expect them never to happen.
Also, a small place will have scheduled out-of-hours work. Those can be well planed or not, and people can be well compensated or not, but they'll always exist.
"At no point have I ever worked outside of contracted hours" but "once I did"? Anyway, you probably worked at large companies only; I work in a startup and if the other ops guy is offline I do work off-hours because, well, the website won’t go back up by itself.