If your engineers build systems but never get woken up when those systems fail, you don't have DevOps. You have developers who throw code over a wall to someone else. The "Ops" in DevOps isn't a label - it's a commitment to owning what you build, all the way through to 3am when it breaks.
Ownership Requires Consequences
True ownership means feeling the weight of your decisions. When an engineer knows they'll be paged if their service falls over, they think differently about error handling, monitoring, and graceful degradation. They write code that's observable because they'll be the one trying to debug it at midnight. They build in circuit breakers because they'd rather not spend their Sunday investigating cascading failures.
Without on-call, this feedback loop doesn't exist. Engineers can ship optimistic code and move on, leaving the consequences for someone else to discover. That's not ownership. That's just typing.
Sharing the Customer Experience
Your customers don't experience outages during business hours on a convenient schedule. They experience them whenever they happen, and those failures cost them time, money, and trust. When your engineers are on call, they share that experience. They feel the urgency of a production incident at 2am, not as an abstract metric in a morning standup, but as a real event that interrupted their life.
This shared experience changes how teams prioritise reliability work. Suddenly, fixing that flaky health check isn't just a backlog item - it's preventing a future page. Improving alert thresholds isn't gold-plating - it's reducing false alarms that burn out the team.
The "You Build It, You Run It" Standard
Amazon popularised this philosophy years ago, and it remains one of the clearest expressions of engineering accountability. The team that writes the code is the team that operates it. There's no separate ops team to catch your mistakes or absorb your technical debt.
This model works because it aligns incentives. When the same people who make architectural decisions also carry the pager, they make better decisions. They invest in automation, documentation, and resilience because they personally benefit from those investments.
What On-Call Actually Requires
Implementing on-call properly isn't about punishing engineers with constant pages. It requires building the infrastructure and culture to make it sustainable. That means investing in observability so problems can be diagnosed quickly. It means establishing clear escalation paths and runbooks. It means treating on-call rotations as real work that deserves compensation and recovery time.
Done well, on-call becomes a source of learning rather than dread. Incidents reveal gaps in systems and processes. Post-mortems drive meaningful improvements. Engineers develop a deeper understanding of how their code behaves under real conditions.
The Test Is Simple
Ask yourself: when your production systems fail at 3am, who gets woken up? If the answer is "not the people who built it," you've separated Dev from Ops. You can call your team whatever you like, but the gap between building and running remains.
DevOps was never about job titles or team structures. It was about engineers taking complete ownership of their systems, from first commit to production incident. On-call is where that ownership becomes real.